#oc; asten evans

[maccreadysbaby]

A Hundred Ways to Become a Wayne

batfamily + oc insert

tw: anxiety attacks

wanna read more? here’s the table of contents!

want to read the first fic in the hundred days series so you understand what’s going on here? here it is!

yall this is the chapter i’ve been waiting for

part thirty-eight

❝ AIR AND FIRE AND WATER (OH MY) ❞

THURSDAY — SEPTEMBER 3 — 1:00 PM

BENTLEY WAS SILENT ALL THE WAY HOME. He wasn’t quite sure what to do with himself. Other than the fact he was pretty much at a standstill regarding his father and the Secret Keeper and all that jazz, he was starting to feel strange. Like a part of him had been ripped out and thrown into the Gotham Harbor. Like one of his organs had been removed and replaced by one that didn’t fit quite right — like something wrong was inside of him now. 

It was like he could feel his blood pumping in his veins. The entire car ride, he could hear it in his ears. He could hear the gasoline swishing in Jason’s gas tank. He could feel the windshield washing liquid like it was a part of him when Jason cleaned the bugs off the window. He could feel Jason’s blood pumping through Jason’s veins.

What the hell was wrong with him?

The wrongness just kept getting wronger when they pulled up at the Manor, because it went from Jason and Jason’s car to feeling the water moving through the whole house. Like he had an ear against every pipe in the Manor, listening to the liquid swish and move. He knew where it was. Where it was going. He knew where each and every toilet and sink and shower and fridge was from exactly where he was sitting in Jason’s car. Where every saline bag and liquid medicine and electrolyte drink was sitting in the cave. The drip Asten was on, how much was left in it, and every single time it dripped. 

Why the hell did he know that?

Jason said something to him when he got out of the car, but he didn’t hear it. It sounded like there was a waterfall inside the Manor. When he went through the door, it just got worse — he could hear every bead, droplet, every liquid in the house screaming and sloshing and moving and churning and bubbling. He could feel it like it was all inside of him, like it was him, like he was made out of water. He could hear his blood moving. He could hear Jason’s blood. Asten’s blood. Nico’s blood. Bruce and Alfred and Dick and Damian and the animals and Duke and everything — could feel the blood, the water, everything. He could feel everything.

He walked up the stairs one step at a time, every rational thought — every thought at all — literally drowned out by the sound. The feelings. He felt like he was going to explode. Like he was going to die. By the time he got to the top of the stairs, he was shaking, and breathing wasn’t as easy as it should’ve been. Why did he feel so wrong? So wrong? So wrong?

His mind kinda-sorta came back to him when he ran face-first into someone in the hall. Someone with a purple hoodie and black sweatpants.

When Dick Grayson looked down at him, Bentley started crying.

“Whoa, hey there, kiddo, what’s wrong?” Dick questioned, kneeling down to the child’s height, his crystalline blue gaze bouncing around Bentley’s face. His hair was wet and floppy like he’d just showered, and it reminded him of the first night he ever met Dick Grayson in the pouring rain.

Bentley could hardly think enough to make a coherent sentence. Air wasn’t coming in or out right, and he was crying and sad and so overwhelmed, why could he hear everything? “I-I don’t fee-feel right.” Was what he ended up saying, wiping frantically at his eyes. (Stuttering, more like.)

Dick breathed in, a sad expression coming across his features. “I think you’re having a panic attack, buddy. Just breathe with-“

“No! Not that,” Bentley argued, batting away Dick’s hands that had been coming for his arms. “Something inside of me. I-I feel like I’m going to die. I think I… I- think I’m about to die.”

A few words were shared between Dick and someone else, and in one fluid movement, Bentley was picked up and deposited on a bed. But hadn’t they just been in the hallway? He didn’t know. He didn’t know anything. The only thing he did know was that everything hurt and he couldn’t breathe and it was so loud.

“Bentley, buddy, tell me what doesn’t feel right,” Dick ordered. Bentley was sitting on the edge of a bed (whose bed? No clue.), halfway in reality, half in his own world of blurry confusing pain. Dick was in front of him, his hands were searching Bentley’s frame for anything abnormal. Jason was near the closed door.

Between the crying and the panicking and the not working lungs, he couldn’t breathe. “Everything. Everything feels wrong.”

Jason said something about Bentley’s dad, but he didn’t really hear him. Dick was touching his shoulders. 

“Bentley, keep talking to me,” He pleaded, rubbing Bentley’s arms lightly. He turned to Jason with a subtle: “Go get Bruce.”

Jason left the room.

Bentley couldn’t focus enough to do much of anything. With a groan of… desperation, maybe? He brought his hands up and covered his ears, trying to drown out all the noise. There was so much noise. Too much noise. 

After an indecipherable amount of time passed, someone else was touching Bentley. Bigger hands, stronger grip. He peeled his eyes open just long enough to see Bruce’s face in front of him, icy blue eyes scanning him mechanically, robotically. His mouth moved but Bentley couldn’t hear him over the crashing waves in his own head.

Gently, his hands were removed from his ears. “Hey there, chum, it’s Bruce. Do you think you can tell me what’s going on?” He was doing a pretty good job masking the concern in his voice, but Bentley heard it anyways.

“I-I can… I…” Bentley choked on a few words and sobs at the same time, his hands shaking like leaves where they sat in Bruce’s grip. “I can… hear… I-I can feel… everything.”

Bentley thought he heard something in the room bang or pop, but he wasn’t sure, he couldn’t exactly hear very good. Bruce suddenly got a strange look on his face, and Jason and Dick, who were behind him, looked stunned.

“B, his eyes-”

“Shh,” Bruce ordered, one of his hands coming up to rest on the side of Bentley’s head. “It’s okay, chum. You’re going to be okay. Just look at me.”

Bentley looked at him as best he could through the tears and panic. He tried not to pay attention to Dick, who walked over to the bathroom door looking really, really confused. 

“Breathe with me,” Bruce tried. He took a deep, calculated breath, and Bentley tried to follow suit. It only sort of worked. The roaring in his head wasn’t fading. If anything, it was starting to sound more… real?

“What the f-”

“Jason!”

Bentley’s attention broke away from Bruce just in time for him to glance at the closed bathroom door — was he in Dick’s room? — and see water. Water, just gushing out from under the door like the crack at the bottom was a pressure washer, straight into the bedroom and all over the floor.

“Bruce-“

“Bentley, just look at me,” 

Bentley did. He just looked at Bruce, tracing the fractals of blue in his eyes, focusing on every hair in his eyebrows, every shade of his skin. Bentley just looked at Bruce as the water started to climb the legs of the bed like a slithering snake, curling and wrapping around until it made it onto the mattress. Dick and Jason were standing off to the side, stunned into silence. Bentley just looked at Bruce.

Bentley continued to just look at Bruce as the water started floating — yes, floating, actually suspended in the air — around the room. Some of it crawled up the walls like vines, some spun and danced in the middle of the air like trees in the breeze. It was getting easier to breathe. The roaring was getting quieter.

“That’s it, you’re okay,” Bruce uttered, his hand moving gently in Bentley’s hair. “You’re okay.”

Bentley finally broke his gaze to glance upward. There was water on the ceiling, spinning and churning in intricate swirls and designs there, and water floating through the air in strands like string. It was moving on the walls, the floor, the furniture like snakes. 

Bruce rubbed a hand over his hair. “That’s it. There you go.”

Bentley breathed in deeply, hiccuping lightly, his brown eyes tracing the flying water. “Bruce…”

“It’s okay,”

He wasn’t… this wasn’t… he wasn’t doing that, was he? He couldn’t be. He wasn’t a metahuman. He hadn’t been in the machine long enough, Davis had said so. He was just Bentley. Just normal Bentley.

Normal Bentley focused on one specific snake of water on the ceiling. He imagined it moving left, and it went left. He imagined it moving right, and it went right. He imagined an intricate, beautiful chandelier, hanging from the ceiling, made entirely of water, and the liquid morphed and moved until it became that. Chains, dangling crystals, and metal galore, all shaped from crystal clear water.

“Oh my God,” Jason muttered. He and Dick were staring at the chandelier made of pure water, but Bruce wasn’t. Bruce was still looking at Bentley.

The water slowly moved from the chandelier back to its spot swirling on the ceiling. 

There was absolutely no way Bentley was doing that. Right? There couldn’t be. He couldn’t be.

As a last ditch effort to prove that he wasn’t controlling the water, he imagined it going back where it came from.

And the water, ever-so-slowly, started to crawl off the bed, down from the ceiling and the walls, across the floor again at a glacial pace. Dick swung the bathroom door open. Bentley watched in a mixture of awe and terror as he watched the vines of water slither back into the toilet and faucets.

When all the water was gone, nothing was wet, not even the mattress, and the room was eerily silent. And Bentley was oddly drained.

Fire, Air, and Water. How clever, Mr. Whittaker.

Bentley looked back up at Bruce, who had a reassuring smile on his face.

“Are you going to get rid of me now?”

Before he heard the reply, everything faded to black.

—

The first (and pretty much only) thing he got back was his hearing.

“-telling you, this is different. The whole structure of his DNA looks strange. It’s different from the last blood sample we have from him — It almost looks like a whole new strand,” That was Tim’s voice, he was pretty sure. 

“So you’re saying that whoever kidnapped him changed his human DNA into metahuman DNA?”

“It looks like they… tore apart his original genome and spliced other parts in… like they manufactured synthetic DNA with the genetic mutation of a metahuman and replaced pieces of his own with it. It looks like… whoa,”

“What is it, Timmy?”

“It’s changing. The synthetic DNA is actually… turning the rest of his DNA into metahuman genomes. Spreading… like a virus,”

“Will that hurt him?”

“Let’s just say… I understand why he thought he was dying,”

“You think that could be why Asten-“

Bentley, had he been any more lucid, would’ve flinched at the absolutely gut-wrenching scream that ripped through the air. He was laying on something soft — it just sort of felt like his bed. A bed, at least. And the scream sounded strangely close to him.

“Well, his genes are being ripped apart and replaced, so, if I had to guess, yeah. That’s probably why he’s screaming,”

“What about Bentley?” He was pretty sure that voice was Dick, now that it said his name.

“It seems to be the beginning of the change. I don’t think there’s much we can do to help,”

Suddenly, Bentley’s eyes began to burn even though they were closed. He moved a hand to rub them, but as soon as he moved his fingers, his entire arm erupted into a blazing, fiery pain that made him whine.

“Are they going to be okay?” Came a third voice — the voice of Nico. Bentley felt a hand land on his shoulder, but instead of being soothing, it left a ripple of burning agony that made him choke out a strange sound. The hand jumped away.

“Yeah, they will,” Replied Dick. “We just have to get them through this. How are you feeling?”

There was a silence where all Bentley heard was his own bated breathing. 

“Well, I… I was already a metahuman, so…”

“Oh… okay,”

Bentley tensed, gripping whoever’s covers he was under hard when a surge of absolute burning agony washed over him. It felt like when he was poisoned. Worse than when he was poisoned — like someone was searing his veins closed with a blowtorch. Another choking sound made it's way out of him, but he couldn’t produce words.

“You’re okay, kiddo. You’re going to be okay,”

Asten screamed again. Nico was suddenly crying.

Another wave of absolute searing agony came and went, and Bentley fought it good — he really did. He kept his whining to a minimum for a solid ten minutes.

But then the fire reached his head, and suddenly, two children’s screams were ripping through the halls of Wayne Manor.

And everyone inside just had to listen.

—

dedicated to @sassenashsworld 💚

—

tag list! (If you want me to remove or add you, ask in comments!)

@fleur-alise @sarcopterygiian @flyrobinflyy @skylathescholar @gayboss-too-close-to-the-sun @xiaonothere

[maccreadysbaby]

A Hundred Ways to Become a Wayne Masterlist

in which, after falling into bruce wayne’s custody, bentley whittaker endures the struggles of your average ten-year-old-boy: starting school, making friends, solving two dozen missing persons cases, having an anxiety attack in a morgue, playing robin for a single night, and catching the eye of gotham’s newest and most dangerous rising supervillain. (he’ll tell bruce about it soon, he swears.)

first fic of the hundred days series linked here! this is fic number two!

one — miracle worker

two — metahuman problems

three — worry yourself sick

four — useless, worthless, and everything in between

five — bristol vs crime alley

six — juvenile delinquent

seven — the secret keeper

eight — safe with me

nine — pity

ten — bludgeoned by a book

eleven — babybird

twelve — targeted

thirteen — acquaintances

fourteen — bird of prey

fifteen — unwelcome memories

sixteen — without a trace seventeen — revelation eighteen — hail the puppeteer nineteen — taking the lead twenty — i‘d give you my lungs (so you could breathe) twenty-one — murder central twenty-two — too close to home twenty-three — boiling twenty-four — breakout twenty-five — hurricane twenty-six — a glimpse into the future(s) twenty-seven — breaking and entering twenty-eight — the truth twenty-nine — the reaper thirty — asphyxiation thirty-one — homebound thirty-two — reunions thirty-three — drowning thirty-four — windstorm thirty-five — arsonist thirty-six — over the edge (almost) thirty-seven — plan b thirty-eight — air and fire and water (oh my) thirty-nine — unlovable

BOOK ONE! 😆

FACECLAIMS FOR BENTLEY, ASTEN, AND NICO 🥳

BENTLEY’S PORTRAIT! 😭

HOW ASTEN MET NICO (A GLIMPSE INTO HIS HOMELIFE AND MENTAL STATE) 😢

WHERE WAS ASTEN IN CHAPTER SEVENTEEN? (A LOOK BEHIND THE SCENES OF CHAPTER SEVENTEEN)😔

[maccreadysbaby]

A Hundred Ways to Become a Wayne

batfamily + oc insert

tw: death and gore

wanna read more? here’s the table of contents!

want to read the first fic in the hundred days series so you understand what’s going on here? here it is!

here’s bentley and his friends going through it™︎

part thirty-one

❝ HOMEBOUND ❞

MONDAY — AUGUST 17 — 10:42PM

BENTLEY, ASTEN, NICO, AND DAVIS DIDN’T MOVE AN INCH. Instead, they all stared at the bodies of the guards that had just choked to death on nothing.

Nico’s glowing white eyes faded back to their normal blue, rolled back into his head, and he fell over without a warning. Thankfully, Asten was quick and close enough to keep his head from hitting the white tile of Dr. Keene’s screwed-up child experimenting facility.

Bentley blinked, taking several moments to look back and forth between the pile of dead guards in the doorway of the sterile white room, and Nico. Had he just… killed them all? With superpowers?

He turned back to Nico and Asten — the latter now had the former’s head on his lap, and he was staring at him, stunned. So many people were… dying. Bentley had to have seen at least twenty people die right before his eyes in the past, what? Thirty minutes? And each one at the hands of people he knew as friends. The thought made him kind of dizzy. He’d seen so many people die.

He flinched when Davis’s metal glove landed on his left shoulder, and when he met his eyes, the green orbs were dancing worriedly across his face and bloody frame. Bentley looked away and sniffled quietly. “You think you can walk so I can carry your friend?”

Honestly, Bentley was running on nothing more than fumes and fear, and had been for at least a solid few days. The added pain and terror from the gunshot was almost inconceivable, blending into one big blur of full-body agony that he couldn’t stop crying over. Even though Davis said the shot wasn’t that bad (he knew it would be a very different situation if he had been shot in the chest or head), keeping himself from falling over seemed to be the most laborious task he’d carried out in a long time. 

But… Nico was passed out, and Bentley wasn’t yet. He wasn’t sure how many steps he’d get in — but if worse came to worse, he was probably small enough that Asten could get by with dragging him or something. So, as much as he wanted Davis to keep carrying him around, to hide his face from the world and pretend he was in Bruce’s arms, he wiped at his furiously leaking eyes and nodded for him to carry Nico instead.

With that, Davis moved across the room to pick him up, which he did while enduring the longest death glare Bentley had ever seen Asten throw in someone’s direction. He didn’t argue, though — much to their surprise. He just stood up once Nico was securely in Davis’s arms, eyes flicking over to Bentley, around the sterile white room. He also sent a glare to the Synchronizer that surely would’ve made it wither had it been anything but metal and machinery.

“We have to get to Titus. He’s on the other end of the facility,” Davis said, shifting Nico around until his head was securely against his shoulder. He was holding him bridal style like he’d been carrying Bentley, and Nico looked really small in his arms.

Asten breathed in, brushing a hand over his blue and black hair. He was still standing ahead of the Synchronizer where Nico had hugged the life out of him. “Titus. The one who can teleport?”

“Yeah. He can get you guys out of here, if we can get to him. If. I’m not sure how far we’ll make it with no self defense. I would offer up my hands, but they’re kinda full,” Davis glanced down at Nico momentarily, something like the vaguest hint of nostalgia or deja vu swirling in his green irises. “We-“

“I can help with that,”

Bentley, Asten, and Davis all flinched in tandem when a fourth voice came — a disembodied female voice that had no obvious user. The voice had come from near the back wall, across from the door, but… there wasn’t anybody there.

Bentley wasn’t, like, losing his mind, was he? The thought made more silent tears slide down his face. He’d lost so much blood he was losing his mind.

“Who’s there?” Davis questioned, taking a few steps past Bentley in the direction of the mysterious voice. Asten moved toward them, ever so slowly inching away from the Synchronizer and ending up at Bentley’s left side.

Suddenly, eliciting a flinch from Asten and a gasp from both Bentley and Davis, the redhead girl that they’d ejected from a Synchronizer on their search for Asten and Nico appeared out of thin air. She was standing against the back wall of the room in a hospital gown that mirrored theirs, picking at her nails. Her light blue eyes seemed to be an odd mixture of color that made them look silver, and her red hair was long and wavy down her back. Her face had much more color than it had earlier.

Davis glowered dangerously at her, tugging Nico closer to himself. “Who are you?”

She stepped forward, a ghost of a smile growing on her petite face. “Don’t worry, I’m not gonna hurt your little sheep. I’ve been following you since you let me out of the machine, which I’m here to repay you for. That is, if you can get your teleporty friend to get me out of here, too.”

“How are you going to help us?” Davis questioned, his voice layered thick with uncertainty and doubt. The girl smirked — smirked.

“I might be straight out of the mad scientist’s oven, but I have a pretty good handle on this whole superpower thing,” She explained, glancing down at her own blank nails, strangely nonchalant now — way calmer than she was earlier. “The names Lydia. Lydia Venice. And with me at your disposal, you’ll be able to walk your happy selves straight to the other side of the compound without a hitch.”

Her freakishly calm demeanor didn’t go unnoticed by Bentley. Either she was adapting extremely well to being kidnapped and experimented on, or…

“And how am I supposed to know if you’re being mind controlled?” Davis questioned, mirroring exactly what Bentley had been thinking. The thought sent a shiver down his spine. What if she was just going to take them back to Dr. Keene? Put them back in the machines to finish the process?

“I guess you don’t… but I feel like myself right now. Making my own choices and all that,”

Bentley would’ve been intrigued in the conversation, had the blood loss been taking less of a toll on him than it actually was. The floating feeling was now putting a fog over everything in his mind, and he was really cold. He could hear his heart beating in his ears, and it seemed to be going way too fast even though he was literally just standing there.

That’s about when his legs decided to give out beneath him.

Thankfully, a pair of arms looped around his middle in a rather un-graceful way, catching him in a position that made his shoulder momentarily set itself ablaze with agony. He let out a cry. Why? The pain? The trauma that was being burned into his head for the rest of his life? He wasn’t sure. But he was pretty sure it was enough to cry about. 

“Whoa, whoa. I’ve got you, red,” Whispered probably the most comforting voice in the room.

Voices were running in the background, Davis and Lydia, but the Bentley was too focused on the fact that Asten had wasted no time pulling him gently back onto his feet. He slung Bentley’s arm around his shoulders, looping his own arm around his torso so he could hold him up. Nearly all of his (minimal) weight was leaning into Asten’s right side, which might’ve felt bad about if his mind wasn’t floating like he was fresh off of anesthesia. He noted the fact that he kind of felt like he wanted to hurl. He also noted the fact that everyone was suddenly looking at him.

Davis stared at him for a solid ten seconds, before he huffed and looked back at Lydia with a tense: “Fine. How are you going to help us?”

She smiled. “Observe.”

She walked over to the Synchronizer in the room, and with the cock of an eyebrow, put her hand on it. She disappeared. The entire Synchronizer disappeared with her. 

“Whatever I touch turns invisible, too. If you hold onto me, no one will see us,” Her voice came from the nothingness in front of them.

“Alright…” Davis sighed to himself, blinking a few times to right his mind. “But if you try anything-“

“You’ll kill me?” The girl reappeared and cracked a strangely genuine looking grin, cocking a hip to the side. “I’ve seen quite the spread of bodies you’ve left in your wake, Reaper. This time and last.”

Davis scowled, a far-off look growing in his eyes momentarily. Bentley remembered hearing about the last time Davis had killed a bunch of people — if his brain wasn’t so foggy he might’ve even remembered what Dr. Keene said the reason was. But he couldn’t. He felt like he was drifting away into darkness. Like the agony was fading and so was he. Even the crying he’d assumed would be endless was tapering away due to the haze he couldn’t get out of.

“Asten,” He whispered, breathing deep despite being relatively still. The Brazilian immediately whipped his head around, his hold on him tightening the slightest.

“What is it?”

Bentley sniffled, batting away the wetness in his eyes to no avail. “I don’t feel good,” He muttered, but he couldn’t bring his gaze up to look his friend in the eyes. How was Asten so warm and everything else was so cold? Bentley was freezing.

The blue haired boy grimaced, glancing back up at Davis and Lydia. “As much as I love spitting empty threats at people, you seem to have forgotten that ginger over here is literally bleeding out. Let’s get this trainwreck on the road, yeah?”

Davis and Lydia’s eyes flicked between each other, Bentley, and Asten, before the former nodded. “It’s now or never.”

Lydia walked toward the door, grabbing onto Davis and Asten’s hospital gowns as she went, tugging them along. Bentley and Nico didn’t have much of a choice but to join them. “You’ll still see yourselves and each other, but no one else will. They can hear and feel us, though, so don’t be idiots.”

Bentley walked along, and he was thankful for Asten baring most of his weight — the strangely dull agony of the gunshot was sending waves of pain pulsing through his muscles, and it made his legs not want to work. It made nothing want to work, really — not even his brain, which was still getting fuzzier.

They left the Synchronizing room and moved into the long, sterile, white hallways, Lydia’s hand staying on the others’ gowns all the way. For now, the corridors were empty, but they branched off into other halls and areas not too far ahead of them, and Bentley wasn’t sure those would be so vacant. Red alarm lights were flashing in the halls, but there were no alarms.

“Titus is in the medical sector,” Davis nodded to the left, down the long hall. Thankfully, they weren’t facing all the dead people left in Davis’s wake. Bentley wasn’t sure he could stomach staring at them all again, black growing and writhing under their skin like a parasite. 

Lydia nodded. “Don’t pull away from me, and keep your mouths shut,” She ordered.

Bentley had no problem with that. The rag-tag group of five, one shot, one unconscious, all supposedly invisible, wearing matching hospital gowns made down the white hallways with Lydia at the lead. Bentley was hardly able to focus on anything except keeping his own two feet under him as Asten walked. Why was it so hard to move his feet the right way?

At one point, a group of guards with guns walked right past them without batting an eye, which meant they really were invisible. And Bentley had never been more grateful in his life.

For a long time, all Bentley saw was bright white and flashing red moving around him. The occasional guard or few passed every now and then, paying them no mind at all. Lydia’s plan was going, dare he say, good. Maybe he would actually make it home.

They were just about to pass a group of six, solid white, armored and gunned guards when Nico decided to wake up.

Screaming.

“No! No, I didn’t mean to! I didn’t mean to!”

Bentley was shocked back into reality at the noise, and everyone began to move. The guards whipped out their weapons, Nico flailed in Davis’s arms, Lydia whipped around to see what was going on and Asten flinched so violently he nearly dropped Bentley on his face. 

“Hey, hey, shh, shh, shh,” Davis tried to hush Nico. He was squirming to the point where Davis had to set him down in favor of not dropping him, his eyes wide and brimming with tears, and the guards were aiming their guns around the hallway in a blind panic. Lydia hadn’t let go of them, and the men in white looked confused, which was a good thing, Bentley thought.

…Until it wasn’t.

Until they began to pull the trigger of their guns blindly, one shot after another, each one aiming in the group’s general direction. There were probably ten or twelve gunshots that erupted from the group, at least two of which were aimed pretty darn close to Bentley and Asten. Lydia let go of everyone in a panic, making them visible to the world.

Bentley was overtake by dread at the realization that he was really dead now. And so was everybody else.

There was a flash of yellow lightning. 

Everyone stood, frozen, unmoving, unblinking. The guards didn’t move. None of Bentley’s group moved. Not a single one of the five captives hit the floor, screamed, or started bleeding like he’d anticipated. Bentley looked down at himself and Asten, examining for blood or gunshots hidden by adrenaline, but there was nothing. At least a couple of those guns had been aimed freakishly close to them.

Nico was now standing directly in front of Bentley and Asten, his chest heaving and eyes sparking with an ever present yellow electricity. His right hand was balled into a fist.

When opened it, all of the bullets that had just been shot fell through his fingers and dinged on the tile.

Suddenly, it all seemed to make sense in Bentley’s only half-working mind. Nico’s hands moving so fast he couldn’t see them, the yellow lightning, the letter from his real parents talking about the Speed Force — Nico had super-speed. Super-speed that was so fast he’d just caught a dozen bulletsthat had been shot not ten feet away from them.

The guards were stunned, and Davis used the moment of confusion to his advantage, flicking a glove off with one resounding click. 

Bentley jumped when more gunshots rang out — directed right at Davis. There was another flash of yellow lightning and Nico was in front of the men with the guns. He dropped another handful of bullets on the floor.

Bentley made sure to look away when Davis used his hands to kill the guards — just like he’d told him — but Asten watched in some mixture of horror and intrigue. Bentley saw Davis move in his peripheral, heard the dull thuds of the guards against the tile.

Nico stumbled back away from Davis, knocking into Asten, who almost dropped Bentley again. 

“Dude, that was awesome! You’re like the freaking flash!” He heard Asten mutter, like he wasn’t literally shot at twenty seconds ago.

Suddenly and silently, Lydia hit the floor in front of the three of them.

They all flinched and peered down at her — she had small streams of blood dripping from her nose, her eyes, her ears. She was staring at them… but wasn’t really looking. 

Bentley inhaled sharply when he realized that she wasn’t looking at all. That her chest wasn’t rising or falling, that she was laying eerily still. In his peripheral, he could see someone standing a ways off in the hallway. Someone with platinum hair and glowing yellow eyes, a twisted stitched smile that would forever be engraved in his mind.

Nico let out a strangled whine at the sight of Lydia’s body, and then promptly threw up in the floor. Asten had a grip on his shoulder with the arm that wasn’t around Bentley.

Davis was suddenly in front of them, obstructing their view of the Secret Keeper. He thrusted the keycard he’d been carrying around toward Asten. “You’re almost there! You just go to the next hall and turn left — you’ll be looking right inside his cell. That should open it. Go!”

Bentley’s heart was hammering in his ears, threatening to split his ribs clean open. Nico looked so pale he might pass out, he was crying again, arms wrapped around himself and looking really tiny. Asten took the hand off of his shoulder to grab the keycard.

Davis un-latched his other glove, but didn’t let it hit the floor yet. He pointed down the hallway when not one of them responded, glancing behind them. “Go!”

“What about you?” Bentley croaked, the sting of tears behind his eyes starting up again. He didn’t have much of a response when Asten rubbed his back. He wasn’t sure he could take any of the self sacrificial bullcrap — he wanted to survive and he wanted Asten to survive and Nico to survive and Davis to survive. Davis had to survive. He’d saved Bentley so many times and death was how he’d repay him?

“What’re you gonna do?” Bentley choked.

Davis turned, moving just enough so Bentley could see the silhouette of the Secret Keeper standing eerily still at the other end of the hall. Then the waiter smiled fondly, green eyes sparkling a little even despite the circumstances. “I’m going to try and have a conversation with my girlfriend.”

Bentley blinked. They all blinked, and he looked at Asten, who look at him, and then at Nico, who looked at them. 

“Charlie?” Asten muttered, eyes falling to the tile. “My God, you must’ve thought she was… for two years…“

“You guys need to get out of here. Get to safety,” Davis replied, agilely avoiding Asten’s statement. “Remember, the first hall that branches left, Titus will be straight ahead.”

Bentley pulled himself out of Asten’s hold and managed to stumble forward just far enough to wrap his arms around Davis’s torso with a poorly stifled round of crying. “Please don’t die.”

Davis patted the top of his head with his still-gloved hand. “You heard it yourself, kid — I am death. Now go.”

Bentley was gently pulled away by Asten’s hand, and despite everything that was screaming for him to stop, they ran. (Well, as much as Bentley could. He was more or less being dragged around by Asten, who had resumed their previous position.) They booked it down the sterile halls and turned down the first one to the left. This one was different — lined with large viewing windows that were accompanied by metal doors. At the end of the hall was a window and door, larger than the others. There weren’t any guards or scientists around. Not that they could see, anyway.

The three of them slowed to a walk, peering into the windows as they passed. Most of the rooms were empty, filled with cabinets of medical supplies and gurneys, but every now and then the gurney would have a human shaped bag that Bentley refused to look at any longer than he had to. Each room had a little plaque on the front, but none of them had any words on them. 

Not that he would be able to read them anyways. His crying had ramped back up to a ten at the very prospect of Davis going head-to-head with the Secret Keeper. He wasn’t… he couldn’t… Davis… he had to touch to kill. As far as Bentley knew, the Secret Keeper — Charlie — didn’t even have to seeher victim to kill them. It was a battle that was already lost, and Bentley already knew the winner.

He could barely breathe.

Asten dragged the heap of crying disaster until they made it to the dead-end, to the largest room. Bentley managed to see that, through his tears, the plaque on that door read: Titus Lancaster.

But the room was empty.

Asten stepped right up to the widow, so close that it fogged up the glass under his breath. “Merda.”

Any shred of hope Bentley had dissipated at the sight of the empty cell. Dr. Keene said on video that had to make it especially so Titus couldn’t teleport out — why would they take him somewhere else? It wasn’t time for his mind control surgery yet, unless Bentley had been in the Synchronizer for a longtime.

They were all going to die.

Nico anxiously ran his hands over his hair, a few quiet sobs wracking his whole body. “This is hopeless!”

Bentley hiccuped, trying his best to choke back the endless crying, trudging through the fog in his brain to try and remember anything else that might help them. Nico plunked himself down against the wall and cried unabashedly, just like he had at the bus stop. Asten stared into the room like, if he looked hard enough, Titus would materialize there.

Even through the crying and agony looming over his head, Bentley managed to remember Dr. Keene talking about when Titus got sick. He remembered seeing him in the hospital bed on the video, and he remembered the second video, where he made him perform his abilities so Bentley’s father could see. And at the end of the video, he said…

Bless him; he prefers to stay in the rafters of his enclosure like some kind of bird at the zoo.

Bentley suddenly leaned forward, peering through the glass up at the ceiling. There were metal beams that spanned the length of the room, and there was a dark blob resting on one. “Titus,” Bentley said, pointing toward the ceiling.

Asten followed his finger with his gaze, and Nico threw himself off of the floor, both peering through the glass. They seemed to visibly relax when their eyes landed on the blob. 

“Good eye, red,”

If Bentley were more lucid, he might’ve replied.

Just like all the other doors, there was a blue light next to the entrance to Titus’s cell — the one Davis had always tapped the keycard on. Below that light was a little screen, no bigger than Bentley’s hand, that read: EM Field Activated.

He and Asten shuffled toward the door, and the latter tapped the keycard on the light just like Davis had. After a moment, it turned green, and the words displayed on the screen changed — EM Field Deactivated.

The door slid open.

None of them moved for a moment, peering around, checking if there was a chance anyone had seen that. Through his own tears and now-slightly-blurry vision, Bentley couldn’t see much of anything except white. 

Asten cleared his throat. “Titus?”

Quickly, the blob in the rafters shifted around, presumably to get a good look at them. 

“A guy named Davis sent us. He… said you can teleport us out of here,”

In a whoosh of wind and color, Titus appeared in front of them. He looked worse than he had in the video — he was twelve, Bentley remembered, but looked like he didn’t even weigh sixty pounds soaking wet. The hospital gown swallowed him. He was only a little taller than Bentley, Nico’s height, but really frail looking. His skin was pale as a sheet of paper, and his deep gray eyes were sunken into his face, his nearly-black hair frizzed up in all directions.

Bentley wasn’t sure which of them was worse off.

Titus’s eyes flicked around warily, from Asten’s calculating stare, to Nico’s sobbing form, to Bentley’s half-red hospital gown. Then he looked at the door behind them, taking a few steps to comprehend if it was actually open or not. He seemed almost… afraid of it. Like he’d been tricked before, or something.

“Yeah, hey, we kinda need a fast exit here,” Asten said, glancing between Nico and Bentley, then looking back at Titus. “Will you help us? You’ll be able to escape, too.”

Titus’s deep gray eyes flicked between the three of them. “Don’t lie.”

“Wha- I’m not lying! We were kidnapped and put in a freaking oven and my friend got shot and we need to go!” Asten replied. Titus flinched backwards at the smallest raise of Asten’s voice, which Bentley didn’t much like.

Asten noticed and took a breath. “Please, Titus. We won’t hurt you. We need your help.”

“You’re just another test,” Titus muttered, backing up until he came in contact with the wall, sliding down until he could curl up on the floor and lacing his hands in his hair. “I’m not gonna try and escape, you can stop making me see things now.”

It made Bentley kind of sad how absolutely… broken Titus seemed. Like a kid that had been stripped of his entire personality and left with nothing but dread. What did he mean by seeing things? Had Dr. Keene been training him into submission like some kind of dog?

“Titus, hey,” Asten tried, looking to Nico for help. “We aren’t a test, we aren’t. You see the alarm lights in the hallway? We need your help getting out of here before guards come.”

Titus looked back up at them warily, his gray eyes watering. “Please go away.”

Gunshots came, making all four boys jump violently in their spots. There were no guards in their hallway yet, but Bentley could only assume the worst — that those had been aimed at Davis.

“Please!” Asten begged, looking out the window into the halls. “Please, please, please. Nothing bads going to happen, I promise. Just… please. We need out of here. Bentley needs a hospital.”

Panic shot through him like an arrow at those words, and he exclaimed: “No! Not a hospital — Wayne Manor.”

Asten didn’t seem to find it in him to correct him. 

“Please, you’re the only one here who can save us. Our friend Davis — you know Davis? — he’s fighting the Secret Keeper right now and-“ Asten breathed in, glancing into the hall anxiously. Bentley was getting so floaty it got kind of hard to tell what he was saying. “-take Bentley to the Manor, and you can take me to Crime Alley. Nico-“

“I’m going to your house,” Nico replied firmly, hazy gaze fixed on Asten. “I can’t… I can’t let my parents see me like this. All screwed up and played with. I can’t.”

Titus stared at them, and Asten huffed. “Okay. Bentley to the Manor, us to Crime Alley. Then you can go wherever you want. Please. Please.”

That was the moment Bentley promptly remembered that Titus’s parents were dead.

“Please?” Nico added, a desperate attempt at getting Titus to oblige.

“I… can… only go where I’ve seen before,” Titus said softly, carefully unraveling himself from the ball. “I can do… Wayne Manor. Not Crime Alley.”

Asten huffed. “That’s fine, that’s fine. We can figure that out after we get Bentley home.”

Titus let out a puff of air, then stepped forward slowly. He reached out, hesitantly, like they would bite him, and then he grabbed onto Asten and Nico’s wrists. “Don’t let go of him,” He ordered softly, gesturing to Bentley. “It’s gonna feel weird. Might hurt. Ready?”

Bentley wasn’t sure if he could survive any more hurt in one day.

Right then, a group of guards — probably ten — turned the corner into the hall. Bullets clinged wildly against the window of the room, not even making a dent in the glass.

“Go now! Go now!” Asten ordered. Titus closed his eyes, squeezed Bentley’s friend’s hands tighter, and then the world swam.

Bentley squeezed his eyes shut. It felt like he was falling, like he was spinning and whipping around in the air with zero control of where he was going. It felt like he had pins and needles across his entire body — the burn of his atoms being ripped apart and put back together in another location.

It only lasted for a split second, before there was a loud whooshing sound, and the ground seemed to rush into Bentley’s feet so hard he stumbled. It was cold, and Asten wasn’t holding onto him anymore, and he was laying on wet grass. He winced when the impact sent waves of pain pulsing through his whole body.

The only things that kept him conscious were the muted groans came from around him, so he looked up. The first thing he saw was the nights sky — big and black and cloudy. He, Asten, and Nico were sprawled on the dewy grass of Wayne Manor’s front courtyard, and Titus was in the middle of them, just standing there like nothing happened. He was spinning around, though, looking at the sky like he had never seen it before.

The Manor was there, glowing against the darkness of night. He didn’t know what day it was, what time it was, but he was home. Bentley had never wanted to bawl his eyes out more.

He used all of his remaining strength to haul himself out of the grass, his friends doing the same with grumbles of discomfort. His entire body seemed to be throbbing and screaming and he pretty much felt like a balloon with the amount of floating his head was doing.

“Want me to come with you?” Asten questioned, brushing dirt off of his hospital down. Bentley shook his head. 

“No,” He replied, bringing his hand up to rest against his injured arm. God, he looked like a disaster. He felt like a disaster.

And Davis might’ve been dead.

“You guys go. I don’t want you to get in trouble,” He forced the words out of his mouth, looking back at them, probably some of the hardest things he’d done. He wanted to pass out so bad. So bad.

“You’re planning on telling them?” Asten questioned, his voice laced with a little tinge of venom.

Bentley blinked, glancing between Nico, who looked terrified, and Asten, who looked suspicious. Even Titus, who was crying now (Bentley guessed it was because he was free?) turned to look at him.

“I… uh…” He did not have the capacity to make a case right then. He just wanted to go inside.

“You can’t tell them, Bentley. You’ll never be allowed out of the house again, and you’ll probably be banned from seeing us for the rest of your life,” Asten stated, throwing a hand to the side. “Plus, you’ll never see the Secret Keeper destroyed.”

“Are you kidding me?” Nico questioned, crossing his arms and peering over at Asten with a dull glare mixed with tears. “We just got kidnapped. Bentley got shot. I got turned into some kind of monster… how can you still care about that?! We could’ve died.”

“Because the Secret Keeper killed my parents! I’m not resting until she’s underground.” Asten shot back, and the lot of them went still. Bentley wasn’t sure if he should pretend he didn’t know that or not, so to play it cool, he just stood there. 

“You can’t tell Bruce, Bentley,” Asten directed his attention back to the redhead. “Lie to him; tell him you just got kidnapped and never saw us. We’ll be hiding out at my house, and no one will find us there, so we’ll still technically be missing. It won’t be so suspicious if we don’t show back up at the same time.”

A pit formed in Bentley’s stomach when he thought about lying to Bruce again, after all of that. It made him want to cry. All he wanted was to let them handle it.

He breathed in, stumbling faintly to the side. “I… I don’t…”

“You can’t tell him not to tell his dad, Asten. He got shot,” Nico spoke up, crossing his arms lightly. “That was freaking traumatizing and you’re asking him not to tell his family about it?”

“You’re hiding out at my house to avoid yours!” Asten argued, flicking a hand toward Nico.

“Because they’re not my real family!” Nico exclaimed, and Bentley blinked. Apparently they’d entered into truth-telling hour. “I’m adopted, and I can’t freaking look at them, okay?”

There was a brief moment of silence where Asten sighed and pinched the bridge of his nose.

“I know you’re into the whole can’t-tell-anybody-how-upset-I-am-so-I-bottle-it-up-and-act-broody thing, but not everybody is you, Asten. Some people will destroy themselves doing that,”

Asten huffed, looking back at Bentley and tossing his hands to the side. “Fine. Tell them whatever you want, Whittaker. I’m going to beat her with or without you. Let’s go. Gotham Heights.”

On command, Titus put a hand on both Nico and Asten’s shoulders, and without another word, they whooshed away in a mixture of color and wind. Bentley was left alone.

He breathed in the cold outside air, turning back to look at the Manor. He really had intended on telling Bruce everything, but now, he wasn’t sure what to do. 

For now, he settled on dragging himself to the front door.

What was he going to say? How was he going to explain? He was pulling himself shot and half dead up to the door of Wayne Manor after hours, maybe days of being missing. He’d run away, broken into a cabin, gotten kidnapped, experimented on, watched one of his friends get turned into a metahuman, and got teleported home by a boy with superpowers. How was he supposed to tell them that?

Plus, he was pretty sure as soon as he saw somebody’s face, he’d start crying.

He made it onto the front entrance, facing those massive wooden doors just like he had the night Nightwing brought him to the Manor for the first time. Why were those doors scarier now than they had been then?

Bentley glanced down at himself. At his half-red hospital gown, his botched shoulder, his bare feet and bloodied skin. He looked like a disaster. He felt like a disaster. He was a disaster.

What was he going to say?

With not much more motivating him than the fact that he felt like death, he lifted a hand and tried the doorknob. Locked.

With a puff of air, he knocked.

A few terrible moments passed where he stood alone on the front step, waiting to see if salvation would come.

And then it did.

The door to Wayne Manor swung open.

“Bentley?”

Like that was the exact moment his body had been waiting for, the darkness he’d been fighting all night finally swept him away. And he let it.

—

dedicated to @sassenashsworld 💚

—

tag list! (If you want me to remove or add you, ask in comments!)

@fleur-alise @sarcopterygiian @flyrobinflyy @skylathescholar @gayboss-too-close-to-the-sun @xiaonothere

[maccreadysbaby]

A Hundred Ways to Become a Wayne

batfamily + oc insert

tw: none

wanna read more? here’s the table of contents!

want to read the first fic in the hundred days series so you understand what’s going on here? here it is!

i did so much “how to break into a house” research for this one my fbi agent is probably on his way :,)

also I was peer pressured into picking face claims for bentley, asten, and nico. here they are

part twenty-seven

❝ BREAKING AND ENTERING ❞

MONDAY — AUGUST 17 — 7:34PM

OKAY, SO MAYBE THIS WHOLE CATCH THE SECRET KEEPER THING WASN’T GOING EXACTLY TO PLAN. 

Nonetheless, they persisted. 

After the second massive breakdown of the night (Asten was now the odd man out because he hadn’t had one.) they pulled the remains of themselves off of the concrete and pushed on. Turned out, Somerset was, like, extremely far to walk. Strolling around in the daytime wasn’t exactly what they’d intended on doing, but it was what they ended up doing, anyhow.

Asten conned some old man from a burger joint into giving them leftover food (he was strangely good at conning people.) that was at least partially out of date. They moved all the way from Crime Alley back to the mainland — and by then, it was nearing four in the afternoon.

Bentley had been floating ever since the Secret Keeper got him. He couldn’t stop thinking. Thinking about Asten’s parents dying because of her, about all the futures she showed him, wondering which one he was unlocking by continuing on the search. He couldn’t stop thinking about the Wayne’s. About Dr. Keene. About his father. About getting found by a wandering vigilante. Part of him wanted to go home, but the rest of him knew he couldn’t. That he had to see this through.

The sun was down when they made it to the outskirts of Somerset. (Or what Asten called the outskirts of Somerset.) It didn’t look much different from the Bristol area — they’d passed many suburbs full of nice houses and large Manor-like homes that were already quiet for the night. The streets were peaceful, and nothing was happening there. Almost like time was at a standstill.

They had been on a rather long, foggy, seemingly empty and dark road that Asten had been insisting was the right way for a while now. It was still pouring rain. There were only a few street lamps on the right side, lighting the sidewalk they were on, and the left side of the road was lined with woods.

They were, more or less, lost.

Asten was still charging ahead of the younger two, a map that he’d printed out clutched tightly in his hands, trying to shield it from rain with his jacket. It had the route from Nico’s all the way to the Cabin scribbled across it in red ink. If they weren’t lost, surely, they were close. They were in Somerset — Asten said the Cabin was in Somerset.

Bentley was walking quietly, side-by-side with Nico, their heads down and hoods up to avoid the rain. They hadn’t spoke much since the whole Secret Keeper thing; none of them had. Asten just kept to his papers and maps, only talking occasionally about where they should go or what they should do. Nico didn’t talk unless he was antagonized. And Bentley… well, he just didn’t talk much anyways. The three of them had taken to fiddling with their fingers and pulling their jackets closer as the night drew on. It was very cold. And very wet. And very cold.

After what seemed like an eternity on the creepy road, Asten sighed lightly, squinting through the darkness at the paper. Bentley could barely see the deep blue tips of his hair through the dark and rain and fog. “Alright. If my intuition isn’t failing me, we should be getting close to-“

“Arkham,” Nico said, nearly breathless. Bentley paused when the blonde fell out of step with him, hanging back, his eyes trained on something in the distance.

Bentley followed his gaze into the foggy downpour past Asten, where the faintest image of a walled-off area came into view.

“I was gonna say the cabin, but Arkham is also accurate,” Asten shrugged, glancing down at the map. He drifted toward them so they were standing in a triangle. “The cabins not that far past it, actually.”

“Past it? Past Arkham? You do realize that’s where insane magical supervillains go, right? People that, like, kill people? You do realize the Jokers in there, right?!” Nico rambled, bringing his arms up and around himself. He was staring so intently at the walls in the distance that Bentley thought his eyeballs might roll out of his head.

He couldn’t see very much through the fog and rain. All he could see were the walls. Sure, Bentley had heard of Arkham — that’s where many of Batman’s adversaries had ended up. But to be right next to it was kind of… weird. Was his father in there? No, his father wasn’t crazy. Was he?

Bentley startled when Asten elbowed him lightly. “Nico is embarrassingly terrified of the Joker.”

“I am not!” Nico argued, punching Asten in the shoulder.  Bentley had heard about the Joker, too — a creepy clown that did all he could to destroy Batman. Bentley was pretty sure… he was even the one who killed Jason when he was Robin. And he’d kidnapped Tim, too, he thought, back when hewas Robin. 

Apparently the Joker didn’t like Robins.

Asten snorted, glancing at Bentley momentarily. “I dressed as the Joker for Halloween last year-“

“It wasn’t funny!”

“-and Nico cried for like, three hours,”

“You jumped through my window!” Nico defended, an exasperated look on his face, his blue eyes wide with layers of swirling emotion Bentley couldn’t even begin to decipher.

“Your parents said I could!”

Nico huffed, crossing his arms over his chest, and his gaze fell to the wet sidewalk under their feet. He dragged the toe of his shoe across the pavement below, mumbling softly to himself:

“Did they?”

Bentley caught the underlying meaning.

Asten’s green eyes flicked between the both of them oddly for a moment, and then he turned. “We’re almost there, you guys. This case is almost closed.”

Nico huffed again, tossing his hands to the side. “The case is barely open, Asten. This whole thing is balancing on a conglomerate of coincidences, conspiracies, and spite.”

“My entire life balances on those things, and I’m not dead yet,”  Asten replied with a shrug, his eyes trailing back down to the soggy map in his hands. “Seriously — we have maybe another half hour to walk, tops.”

“You do realize people have broken out of Arkham, right? Like the Joker…?” Nico muttered, and all it earned him was an are you serious? look from Asten. “What? He’s killed people!”

Asten continued down the road, the other two following reluctantly behind. “So has the girl we’re going after, bucket-head.”

Asten and Nico continued to bicker as they made their way down the dark road. Bentley’s eyes lingered on the massive, walled building that they were approaching. ARKHAM ASYLUM, the gate said, and the storm only worked to make it creepier. He wondered how many bad guys were in there. There could’ve been a ton. All different kinds with all different superpowers, waiting for something to happen so they could get out again.

Surely his father wasn’t in there.

Exactly thirty-six minutes later, much to Bentleys disbelief, Nico’s disdain, and Asten’s relief, they paused at a gravel drive with a little wooden sign sticking out of the ground right at the end. The words PINEWOOD CABINwere carved into it, with a big arrow that pointed down the road. Arkham had long since disappeared behind them, replaced with forest on either side of the road and rain pouring from above.

Asten clicked his tongue, turning back to them with a triumphant look spread across his dimly lit features. “Am I awesome or what?”

Nico, from Bentley’s right, deadpanned: “Or what.”

Asten gave him a pointed glare, then began to peel the black backpack off of his shoulders.

To be best friends, they sure were sort of mean to each other. It was confusing. Because, in all the time Bentley spent with them, they were hardly nice. They teased each other and called each other names and said stuff that would probably make Bentley rethink his whole life if it were directed toward him.

But Bentley also knew that Asten would probably throw himself in front of a moving train to shove Nico out of the way. And that didn’t make sense. Why were they not nice if they cared about each other so much? He guessed it was kind of like Jason and Dick, maybe. They were brothers, but not exactly the nicest brothers.

Neither Asten or Nico had ever been mean to Bentley.

Did that mean they weren’t actually friends with him?

“Here,”

Bentley snapped out of it, dumbly reaching for the definitely-too-large black gloves Asten was holding in his direction. He dug around in the backpack and pulled out an identical one for Nico. Then himself.

“When we go inside, we’re gonna keep our hoods up incase there are security cameras, so don’t look up at the ceiling like a bunch of ding-dongs,” He ordered, pulling a large flashlight out of the backpack, too, and shoving his map inside. “We have to assume cops will be on the way. From any of the surrounding police stations, it would take at least fifteen minutes for them to get here. So we’re going to tear the place apart in ten. Leave no fingerprints, no DNA, and for goodness sake, don’t look at the ceiling.”

Bentley quietly pulled the gloves on as Asten spoke. His former assumption was right — they were kind of huge on his hands, but his ice-cold, basically numb fingers were grateful. He could see Nico doing the same in his peripheral.

“We’re looking for anything suspicious about the place. Literally anything. Rat poison in the kitchen, creepy computer in the bedroom, splatter of blood on the carpet — I don’t care. We just have to find something.”

Bentley hummed, glancing around at the dark forest that was towering over the three of them in every direction. “And if we don’t?”

“We’ll hunker down at my place and then do it again,” Asten shrugged, tugging his gloves on, too. “It wasn’t my intention for everyone to think we’re missing, but it works. You guys can’t go home until we’re done. The police will be crawling all of Gotham for you nosebleeds. But me? They won’t take a second look at my place if they can help it. That, plus the fact that there’s no risk of Sam coming home, makes it a good place to lay low.”

Bentley blinked. Sam. Who was Sam? Was that the uncle that Asten lived with?

“You sound like you’ve done this before,” Bentley commented, glancing up at Asten in the darkness.

The Brazilian merely shrugged, eyes trained on the gloves. “I live in Crime Alley, kid. You have to do what you have to do to keep yourself alive.”

Bentley said nothing.

“Oh, and when we get there, don’t talk unless you have to. Whisper. We don’t want our voices or intentions being realized if the place is bugged,” Asten continued, zipping up the bag and throwing it back over his shoulders.

Bentley creased his brow. “Bugged?”

“It means, like… that there might be little listening devices hidden around the cabin,” Nico explained softly, his attention turning to Asten. “So the dimbo with the Portuguese accent is gonna have to keep his mouth shut.”

Asten snorted. “We all have to keep our mouths shut. You have a weird Bristol lilt and Bentley has not an ounce of Gotham in him. If the police are any good at their jobs, our voices will give us away instantly. That is, if they’re dumb enough not to link our disappearances to the three kids on the security cameras first.”

Bentley cringed. This was going to be a disaster, wasn’t it?

“If they’re doing crime in that cabin, though, don’t you think there wouldn’t be any security cameras?” Nico piped up, blue eyes bouncing from Asten to Bentley a few times.

Asten shrugged. “Good thought. But it’s still smart to act like there is.”

Bentley wondered how many places Asten had broken into. He already knew one — Nico’s house. Why had Asten broke into Nico’s house, anyway?

Asten clicked the long flashlight on, peering down the gravel road. The cabin was buried deep in the woods, out of their sight, which meant they’d be taking a long walk through foggy, creepy woods in the freezing cold rain.

Yay?

“Asten,” Nico spoke up, shivering under his jacket, tugging the wet material closer to fend off the cold. “We’re going to get arrested. If we don’t die of hypothermia first. It’s cold.”

“Then let’s go. A dry cabin awaits,” Asten announced, setting off down the gravel road with his flashlight.

So they went.

— 

The cabin was not as pretty as the pictures made it out to be.

Maybe it was the fact that Bentley couldn’t really see it through the pouring rain and fog and darkness. It looked just… like an old cabin. None of the lights were on, and there were no cars, which was good. At least they knew that there was actually nobody home.

The woods had grown up a bit around it and sort of closed it off from the rest of the world. Massive trees towered over it, swaying in the wind and the storm. (At least it wasn’t thundering.)

Asten turned to them as they neared the building. His expression was a strange mixture of excitement, surprise, and maybe doubt. “Hoods up. Heads down. No talking.”

Bentley, with nothing else to do anyways, obeyed.

They walked, Bentley in particular looking straight down at his feet, until they made it on the red-painted front porch and the rain stopped tapping him on the hood. The porch itself was long, with a few rocking chairs and a swing. The floor was fading, some paint chipping off near the edges of the stairs, and moss was beginning to creep up around the perimeter. 

The front door was bright green, and each window had curtains pulled over them so weirdos couldn’t see inside. (Weren’t they technically the weirdos, though?)

Asten dropped his bag on the porch, unzipping it and pulling out a ziplock of… metal wedges?

Bentley and Nico both watched in varying levels of confusion and interest as he pulled a rubber hammer out of his belt and began to wedge the metal triangles into the crack between the door and the frame.

Nico cringed, whispering: “I feel like I’m seeing something I shouldn’t be.”

“Sh!” Asten ordered. Once he had at least six wedges in place, he pulled out the crowbar, jammed the flat end into the crack, and shoved it with his entire body weight.

The door popped open, swinging inward and banging against the wall behind it, and all the wedges clattered on the floor.

Nico and Bentley stood in silence until Asten turned to look at them, calculating, waiting. No alarm. No hiss. No beep.

Asten gathered his wedges, put his tools back in his belt, threw his bag over his shoulder and walked inside. 

Oh God. They really, literally had just broken into a house. For real. 

Bentley was so dead.

Nico seemed to come to the same conclusion, because he paled dangerously and stayed rooted to his spot.

Bentley stepped inside behind Asten.

The front door opened straight into a living room. Directly ahead was a stone fireplace, flanked by nice, cozy couches and a few chairs. They were sitting on a large, animal-pelt rug that looked extremely expensive. There was a kitchen off to the left, a dining room to the right, and a hallway right next to the fireplace that led to what Bentley assumed was bedrooms. The warm air washed over him, and he sighed.

Ten minutes.

Ten minutes had never passed so fast in Bentley’s life. They tore the place apart. Not one part of the cabin went unchecked — cabinets were emptied with stealthy and calculating hands, cushions were removed from furniture pieces, curtains and paintings were checked behind, closets were sifted through, and, by minute eight, they’d turned the entire place upside down.

 By minute nine, they still hadn’t found anything.

Not that Bentley really knew what he was looking for. Sure he could find, like, blood or something, but he wasn’t even sure what else would be considered suspicious for the most part. Sure, like, weapons and stuff, but Asten’s examples were rat poison. A computer. Why were those things suspicious? 

When minute ten struck, Asten told them it was time to leave.

Bentley pulled himself out of the guest bathroom floor (he was checking cabinets there.) and made his way back to the front of the cabin. 

They hadn’t found anything. Which meant they were going back to Asten’s house. Maybe they could stay somewhere closer — he’d have to ask about that. Crime Alley was a long way away for them to come back another time. (And kind of scary, too. And a place vigilantes spent too much time in.) Yeah. He wasn’t sure he wanted to stay there.

(He was also trying to ignore the disappointment that lingered when he realized  they’d done all of this for nothing.)

The three of them were corralling toward the front door when a Wham!followed by a little “Ow.” Erupted from behind Bentley.

Both he and Asten pivoted, eyes landing on Nico, who was on his hands and knees in the floor. The corner of the animal skin rug in the living room was bunched up like he’d tripped on it.

Bentley instinctively knelt next to him. “Are you okay?” His whisper was so soft it was hardly audible — he didn’t want his voice caught on a bug.

Nico nodded, only glancing up at him for a moment before he started to pull himself out of the floor. The simple motion pulled the animal skin rug more.

Asten gasped.

Bentley was blissfully aware of what was going on as Asten basically careened toward them, ushering Nico off the rug as quickly as he could. 

Instead of flattening it back out, he pulled the whole thing to the side, and Bentley’s heart skipped.

In the deep hardwood floors, there was a crevice. A crevice that made a square, like someone had pulled out a saw and cut a perfect little shape in the wood. One end of the square had hinges — the other, a tiny metal rung for someone’s fingers.

A trapdoor.

Asten looked at Bentley, his excited, triumphant attitude gone, replaced by something like shock and nerves. His green eyes had something swirling in them.

Bentley glanced over at Nico. He sincerely looked like he was about to pass out or throw up — one of the two. His face had gone paper pale. His eyes met Bentley’s, and something in them was pleading. Begging for them to just go home.

“Asten,” Nico said through clenched teeth, in the smallest voice he could muster. “I don’t want to go down there.”

Asten’s green eyes floated between his two friends. “Then stay. I’ll be back.”

“No!” Nico suddenly exclaimed, glancing around the room like he was nervous someone would walk in. “You don’t know what’s down there.”

“Which is why I’m going to figure it out,” Asten whispered back, in a soft duhtone. His eyes shifted to Bentley. “Are you coming?”

Silently, he nodded.

If Asten was going down there, he sure as heck wouldn’t be going alone, that was for sure. 

“Please, let’s just go,” Nico continued, rubbing a hand over his face. “This isn’t our problem. We’re not the cops. People get straight-up murdered in creepy basements like this. I… think I’m gonna puke.” 

Bentley let his hand drift up to rest on Nico’s shoulder, but it only helped to make him jump. When he looked over at him, his blue eyes were on the verge of glassy, and he really did look like he might throw up.

“Just stay up here. We’ll come right back up and tell you what we see. Promise,” Asten said with a forced little smile. 

“No. You can’t,” Nico argued, a familiar thickness coming over his voice like he was only moments away from being in tears. “Please, can we just go home? I’m so freaking scared.”

“We can’t give up now,” Asten stated, sending a glance to Bentley. “Everything will be fine.”

Asten pulled the trapdoor open, revealing a long, deep, pitch-black abyss with old wooden stairs that seemingly led to nothing. Bentley heard Nico’s breath hitch beside him, and he squinted to try and see the bottom. He couldn’t.

Asten didn’t hesitate to step inside.

Bentley didn’t hesitate to follow.

—

dedicated to @sassenashsworld 💚

—

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@fleur-alise @sarcopterygiian @cademygod @skylathescholar @gayboss-too-close-to-the-sun

[maccreadysbaby]

A Hundred Ways to Become a Wayne

batfamily + oc insert

tw: angst

wanna read more? here’s the table of contents!

want to read the first fic in the hundred days series so you understand what’s going on here? here it is!

jaybird :,( I’m breaking my own heart over here

part twenty-three

❝ BOILING ❞

FRIDAY — AUGUST 14 — 9:17AM

TIM WAS SICK.

Like, really sick.

He was the first of the downed three to wake, four hours after he collapsed, just to catapult directly into another hour-thirty-three minute anxiety attack that no amount of consoling could stop. Bentley simply sat with Dick while Bruce tried everything in the book to help him. Jason’s periodic screaming only seemed to make it worse and worse until Alfred decided it would be best to give Tim some sedatives.

When he woke up three hours after that, he threw up all over Bruce.

Now, on Friday morning, Tim had been bedridden and sporting a fever over one-hundred for nearly three days. Dick, Bruce, and Alfred had been going in and out of the cave, taking turns, but never leaving the trio in the medbay without a caretaker.

Jason, who was hooked up to a myriad of drips and machines, was still fighting like hell. He had been for the entire three days — screaming, thrashing, throwing himself around so violently the hospital bed had to be moved back to it's original spot a couple of times. The noise didn’t seem to bother Tim or Damian, who were both unresponsive and varying degrees of out of it. Damian was more or less catatonic, completely unresponsive to outside sound or touch, while Tim was… sort of delirious. The Secret Keeper hadn’t seemed to take hold of him, at least not for very long, but an absolutely raging fever had. Dick already had to talk him out of trying to patrol as Robin. Not Red Robin, but Robin, Batman’s sidekick, and the conversation ended with tears on Tim’s part. But at least he could wake up, even if he was just living in a fever-dream.

Bentley, for the past three days, had just sort of been… floating around. Bruce and Cass had to clear the Manor three more times before he as much as thought about going upstairs. And even then, he refused to be alone when he went. He’d slept with Dick the first night back upstairs, and Duke the second. Most of his time was spent in the cave, since there was always guaranteed to be someone down there. He hadn’t as much as checked his phone since this all started — which probably meant Asten and Nico thought he was dead. Not that he cared enough to go find the device anyways.

Instead, he abandoned Duke’s room on Friday morning and went down to the cave instead, where he knew he’d find Dick. Just last night, he and Alfred had manhandled Bruce into getting some rest, and the Butler was on babysitting duty to make sure he actually did. As far as Bentley could assume, Dick was the only (conscious) one that was down there.

As soon as he started down the stairs that led to the cave in Tim’s old Wonder Woman pajamas, he could hear Jason screaming. A sound he’d become accustomed to, as twisted as that sounded. 

It was different this time, though. As opposed to the undistinguishable wails that had been erupting out of him for three days straight, now, there were words. Screamed with such a rage, a desperation, a terror that Bentley very nearly hauled himself straight back up the stairs at the sound of it.

“Get away! Get away! I’ll kill you! I’ll kill you!” 

There was the clacking of the bed again, that signaled that he was thrashing. 

And then a second voice came, laced with something thick, like they were speaking through molasses: “It’s okay, Little Wing. You’re in the cave. You’re okay.”

“I’ll kill you! I’ll kill you!”

Bentley’s socked feet padded onto the hard floor of the cave, and he peered inside, just far enough to see Dick close at Jason’s bedside in the medbay.

Jason was trying his hardest to wrench himself out of the leather straps, throwing himself around, eyes still closed. The drips and tubes that were attached to him kept getting carefully moved by Dick when he would get them tangled or  almost knock them over. Based on what Bentley could see, the thrashing wasn’t as violent as it had been — he was probably wearing himself out.

“I’ll kill you! I’ll kill you…”

“I’m right here, Jay. You’re okay,”

Tim and Damian were both just… laying there. Damian, stiff as a board, not doing anything but breathing. Tim shifted around to get more comfortable every so often. There was a bowl of water and a rag on his bedside table, as well as a strategically placed red bucket in the floor that looked like where he was supposed to aim if he puked again. 

Bentley wasn’t sure how long Jason had been screaming empty threats across the cave, but he assumed he was arriving at the tail end of it. Because just as quickly as Jason had thrashed and screamed, now, he was starting to cry.

Bentley had never seen Jason Todd cry.

He just stood, watching in silence as the thrashing died down and Jason futilely tried to tug his limbs free from the restraints, trying his hardest to curl into himself even though he couldn’t. “B! Batman! Batman!” He sobbed.

Bentley took a deep breath at the same time Dick did. The sound of his shouting changed again, this one more like a child in terror. 

Dick dared to reach forward and brush Jason’s white streak away from his face. “Hey, hey, hey, Jaybird, you’re okay-“

“Batman! Bat- Bat- Bruce! Bruce!”

Bentley inched farther into the room. What was Jason seeing? What was he seeing that scared him so much he was screaming for Bruce?

“B! Bruce! Bruce!” He kept on and on like a broken record, moving his head from side to side, expression heavy with something like hopelessness. He seemed to be losing his energy, his words becoming slurred and quieter, his movements slowing. “Bruce! Bruce… please… Dad…”

Dick kept on brushing Jason’s hair back, even though Bentley could nearly see how tense he was becoming. “You’re not alone, Jason.”

“I don’t want to die… Dad… I don’t want to die…”

Bentley’s heart sank into his toes. Was this how Jason died when he was just a teenager? Screaming for Bruce by name? Screaming for his dad?

Was the Secret Keeper making him relive his death?

“Dad!” The last shout before Jason fell limp was loud, desperate, nearly inhuman. Like a war cry at the end of a battle he knew he was losing.

The loud scream jostled Tim out of his not-so-peaceful slumber, which he announced his exit from with a loud groan: “M’ gonna hurl.”

Bentley decided that he should probably stop just standing there and make himself useful. So he pitter-pattered into the medbay as quickly as he could, fetching the red barf bucket off the floor (ew.) and bringing it up to the edge of the bed. Tim promptly retched into it, and Bentley busied himself by glancing back at Dick, praying Tim wouldn’t throw up on his hands.

Dick’s chair was empty.

Which was fine. He couldn’t have gone far, all Bentley had done was grab a barf bucket off the floor. Surely he’d be back soon.

Bentley looked back at Tim when he heard him flop back down on the bed with another groan. At least he seemed… here, Bentley guessed. 

“Are you okay?” He asked. Stupid question, considering that Tim, who already didn’t eat enough, had just barfed his organs out into a bucket that Bentley was just standing there holding. He scrunched his face up at the realization and put it back on the floor. Tim’s heart monitor was beeping quickly, but not too fast, he guessed. The temperature gauge screen off to the side read 104.8.

Tim’s red, icy eyes landed on Bentley, and sweat gleamed on his skin as he turned his head toward him. His black hair was hanging down in his eyes, but he didn’t seem to care. He looked at him with a strange blankness. “Of course I’m okay, kid. I’m Robin, I have to be okay.”

Oh. So this was how it was going to go. Maybe Tim wasn’t as here as Bentley thought.

Tim’s eyes widened for a split second. “I shouldn’t have said that out loud.”

Bentley blinked. Where was Dick when he needed him? A quick glance back revealed that his chair was still vacant.

Bentley startled when Tim brought his hands up, whacking himself in the face. “B’s gonna kill me for telling you that!”

“Uh… I… you’re… Red Robin, Tim. Not Robin,”

Tim uncovered his eyes, and they narrowed into slits as he glared coldly at Bentley. “I am Robin.” He said, like he hadn’t just hit himself for saying that three seconds ago.

Okay, don’t argue with someone who’s delirious, Bentley reminded himself. “I… I know you’re Robin. It’s okay. Bruce told me.”

Tim scoured Bentley’s face for a solid ten seconds with his eyes, but then seemed satisfied with that answer, turning over to shove his face in his pillow. “I feel like death.”

“Yeah… your fevers really high,” Bentley replied, glancing at the numbers on the screen. 

“I have to go to school. I have a seminar,” Said Tim Drake, who graduated, like, two years ago.

“You’re.. really sick. I think you should stay home,” Bentley suggested.

“You’re kicking me off of patrol?!” Okay, so we’re back to being Robin. “I can patrol with a fever, I’ve done it plenty!”

Bentley glanced around, desperately wishing Dick would come back from wherever he was. “You should sleep, Tim.”

“I can’t sleep,” He murmured into the pillow. “Dying instead.”

Tim was very… dramatic… when he was delirious.

Bentley sighed deeply. “You’re just sick. Not dying.”

“I am dying, I have no spleen,” He murmured. Bentley wasn’t even sure what a spleen was, nor how it contributed to him dying. 

“You’re not dying,” He replied. “Bruce and Alfred are taking good care of you.”

Tim groaned again, and after a few minutes of quiet, moved around and then went still, his eyes fluttering closed. Bentley sighed. At least he hadn’t had to physically put Tim back in the bed like Dick had.

Bruce had said the sickness was caused by the extreme stress and anxiety Tim was in, and that it had happened once before, when Tim was Robin. Bentley hadn’t known that stress and anxiety could make someone sick. But he guessed it made sense, since he used to throw up sometimes when his dad would scare him really bad.

With a soft sigh, he pulled the blankets back up over Tim’s shivering frame, sending a glance behind him to Jason. He was just laying there, limp. His heart monitor kept speeding up and slowing down ever so slightly, like he was dreaming. Damian still hadn’t moved.

And someone was crying.

Bentley whirled around and looked down at Tim, whose eyes were still closed and features were still peaceful. It wasn’t coming from the medbay, it was outside of the medbay, somewhere else in the cave.

Bentley pushed himself forward slowly, pausing when he came to the medbay door to scan the rest of the cave. 

Dick was at the Batcomputer, but the screen wasn’t on. He was just kind of standing there, one hand firmly planted on the desk to support his weight, the other hand clasped over his eyes.

He was the one crying.

The Secret Keeper really knew how to tear a family apart, didn’t she?

Bentley moved forward, out of the medbay, but Dick didn’t seem to notice. He didn’t seem to notice Bentley’s presence in the slightest until the child plastered himself against his back, hugging tightly around his waist with no reproach.

And Dick lost it.

He sobbed and choked and gasped for air until he couldn’t as much as stand anymore, and he had to crouch down to avoid falling over. Bentley moved, then, from his back to his front, synching his arms around his neck with a grip he didn’t even think Batman could break. And they stayed like that for at least ten minutes before Dick had the willpower to hug him back, shoving his face into the shoulder of Tim’s old Wonder Woman pajamas and letting out a lifetime of tears there. Bentley didn’t mind, although it was getting increasingly difficult for him to fight away the burn behind his own eyes. He just did what he knew best, what always helped him — he moved his fingers through the black waves on the back of Dick’s head.

“I hate this,” Dick admitted quietly. “I can’t handle it, Babybird.”

Bentley was so preoccupied that he didn’t even notice that the hopelessness he felt only a few days prior was slowly bubbling into rage.

—

“-herself on every point exactly as she might have foreseen. She wrote cheerfully, seemed surrounded with comforts, and mentioned nothing which she could not praise. The house, furniture, neighborhood, and roads, were all to her taste, and Lady Catherine's behavior was most friendly and ob… obli… oblig-“

“Obliging,” Alfred corrected softly.

“Obliging,” Bentley repeated, sending a glance up to Jason, like his unconscious form would mind that Bentley messed up the words to his favorite book.

Dick had been officially banned from the cave for a while after Alfred found he and Bentley in a heap on the floor. Now, the oldest Wayne son was upstairs with Bruce, who was probably doing a way better job at comforting him than Bentley ever could.

In order to not be useless, Bentley had taken it upon himself to fill the quiet in the medbay that Dick had left in his absence. The solution — read Jason’s favorite book to him (and everyone else, because they didn’t really have a choice.)

Pride and Prejudice was a weird book. Bentley really wasn’t sure why Jason liked it so much — he’d been reading for about an hour and understood a solid none. Everyone talked weird (including the narrator) and there was an abundance of big and strange words that Bentley had to struggle through until Alfred realized what he was trying to say.

Jason and Damian hadn’t moved since Dick had left. Damian hadn’t moved at all, actually, since he stopped curling his fists a few days prior. Jason seemed to have tired himself out, because he, too, had fallen unresponsive, covered with a thick layer of sweat. His heart rate spiked every now and then, but he didn’t move or make sounds like he had been.

Tim had thrown up twice more and was now sporting a fever of a hundred and five, which seemed concerning, but Alfred had it handled (or was playing it very cool). Tim had gone from kind of funny and delirious to terrifyingly bedridden and unable to hold any kind of conversation. He, too, was pouring sweat from his entire body. It seemed like he was trying hard to fight off the sickness — and Bentley wasn’t sure if he was winning or not.

“Are they going to be okay?” Were the next words that came out of Bentley’s mouth, definitely not from the pages of Jason’s old book.

Alfred looked up from what he was doing on the other end of the room. He seemed to be preparing a new drip for someone. “All in due time, my boy.”

Bentley’s eyes traveled across the trio of beds he was sitting between, bouncing from one incapacitated Wayne’s face to the next. “And Tim?”

Alfred’s gray irises followed Bentley’s gaze to Tim’s fever-flushed face. “Master Tim is as resilient as they come; they will all be on the road to recovery before you know it.”

Bentley said nothing, just looked down at the pages of the book in his hand. 

After a few moments of silence, a pair of footsteps from the other end of the cave caught Bentley’s attention. He looked up, at the door, and Bruce was standing in it.

“Hey there, chum,” He said, his dull gray eyes flicking between the trio of beds, then drifting to the book in Bentley’s hands. “Hosting a book club?”

Bentley shrugged. “Well, they can't really say no.”

They fell into a stiff silence that was only broken when Bruce beckoned Bentley with his hand. “C’mere. I want to get your opinion on something.” 

Bentley glanced back at Jason, laying Pride and Prejudice on the bedside table next to him. Then he followed Bruce out of the room.

He was escorted across the cave into a room he’d never been in before. It seemed to hold all of the vigilantes' extra suits and weapons. The most notable of which were Dick, Jason, Tim, and Damian’s old Robin suits displayed in glass cases, (maybe not the original things, since Jason had been killed in his, and there’s no good way to get bomb out of a suit.) as well as a Batman suit that looked the slightest bit different from Bruce’s. Maybe from when Dick was Batman?

Bruce, instead of heading for those, strolled over to a large table with a myriad of folded suits on top, including his and Damian’s current suits, and a few ones Bentley didn’t recognize. The child watched in silence as Bruce grabbed a neatly folded black suit from the surface. He carefully unfolded it and held it up, and Bentley might’ve been confused if it weren’t for the large, unmistakable R on the shoulder.

It was a new Robin suit. Instead of bright primary colors, the base suit was black and dark gray, with minimal, tastefully-done blood-red detailing. The cape was black on the outside, but the classic Robin yellow on the inside. 

“I’ve been working on something that better suits Damian, but I’m stumped on the cape. I have several more—“ Bentley watched as Bruce pulled out a solid yellow cape (like Dick and Jason’s old ones.) from one of the desk drawers, along with a black one with red on the inside. “— which do you think?”

Bentley glanced between the trio of capes. He wasn’t exactly sure what was going on — maybe Bruce was trying to distract him? He wasn’t sure, but he didn’t really mind, either. He had been reading Pride and Prejudice for way too long anyways.

Bentley hummed lightly. Damian would probably like a black one, just because they were discreet and not as easily noticed. And the nod to the previous Robins seemed like something he would appreciate.

Bentley pointed subtly at the black and yellow one. “I think that one.”

Not that he knew Damian that well anymore.

Bruce nodded, folding everything back up and setting it down neatly. For a few moments, they just stood in silence, neither speaking, neither moving to leave. 

“Bentley,” Bruce started, eyes trailing across the table. “I have a question to ask. If you don’t have an answer for me, that’s okay… you don’t have to.”

Bentley breathed in deep, fiddling with the hem of one of his sleeves. “Okay…”

“Your father… has requested to see you,” Bruce said slowly, with a soft sigh and a wipe to his brow. He looked up at Bentley, and his blue-gray eyes stayed trained on the child, calculating.

It suddenly got very, very hot in the cave.

Bentley’s dad wanted to see him? To talk to him? To take him back? Tim and Damian already didn’t want him there, had they told Bruce that? Would Bruce really just give him back? Was it even legal for his dad to see him after he tried to kill him?!

Bentley shook his head so quickly he got kind of dizzy. “No. No, please, Bruce, please don’t make me…” 

Bruce was reaching for him. “Bentley-“

Bentley flinched away from his hands. “Please. Please, please, please, don’t make me. I don’t want him to take me away, I-I want to stay with you, Bruce, please-“

“Bentley, Bentley, hey-” The child flinched when Bruce’s hand landed on the side of his head. “-you don’t have to. You don’t have to do anything.”

Bentley sniffled. When had he started crying? He was a wreck. An absolute wreck. How was he going to destroy the Secret Keeper when he was constantly one statement, one memory, one thought away from breaking down?

“I wanna stay with you…” He trailed off, wiping at his eyes. Bruce ran a hand over Bentley’s head with a look somewhat reminiscent of Dick. “Please don’t get rid of me, Bruce, I’ll be better. I promise-“

“Hey, hey,” He said softly, bending down just far enough to pick Bentley up off the floor. The child didn’t argue, merely slinking his arms up and around Bruce’s neck in return. “I would never, ever get rid of you, Bentley. Never.”

Bentley clung ever-tighter to him, batting away the tears in his eyes and resting his head on his shoulder.

Bruce rested a hand on the back of Bentley’s head. “I love you, chum.”

Bentley’s eyes went wide, and he was sure his breathing stopped. The only person that’d ever said that to him was Dick.

Bentley cried.

—

dedicated to @sassenashsworld 💚

—

tag list! (If you want me to remove or add you, ask in comments!)

@fleur-alise @sarcopterygiian @cademygod @skylathescholar

[maccreadysbaby]

A Hundred Ways to Become a Wayne

batfamily + oc insert

tw: none

wanna read more? here’s the table of contents!

want to read the first fic in the hundred days series so you understand what’s going on here? here it is!

and john’s back at it again ALSO one of his lines is FORESHADOWING babdmdkdkfjsn

part thirty-seven

❝ PLAN B ❞

THURSDAY — SEPTEMBER 3 — 12:00 PM

BENTLEY WAS PRETTY SURE HE’D NEVER MET ANYONE, NOT EVEN THE PUPPET MASTER, WHO COULD PULL STRINGS LIKE A WAYNE. Because, less than four hours later (with Bruce’s blessing), Bentley Whittaker and Jason Todd were waiting to get called into the visitation room at Blackgate Penitentiary to see his father.

Bentley hadn’t expected to be so nervous. Maybe he should’ve, since he was going to talk to the man who’d abused him for ten years, kidnapped him, poisoned him, and was now turning people into terrifying monsters whose only soul purpose was to murder his family. Not to mention that he’d just been patted and scanned and checked all over by people who, he was pretty darn positive, were carrying guns. And he was in a prison. Full of, like, murderers and stuff.

Before they’d left the house, he’d been a normal amount of nervous, but now, sitting in the empty prison hallway, he was downright horrified. He and Jason were sitting in uncomfortable metal chairs, staring down at old tile. Bentley’s knee was bouncing at a pace that might rival Nico’s superpowers. Honestly, as dreary as it was, he’d rather be back at the Manor sitting on the same loveseat watching Asten puke his guts out every ten minutes. (Because, yes, that was happening again.)

Bentley heard Jason breathe in and out. “You know, it’s not too late to back out.”

Bentley glanced over at him. They were both a little more presentable now, mirroring one another in varying colored jeans and hoodies. Jason had fixed his hair in its typical upward fashion, putting the white streak on full display. He was looking back at Bentley, a serious look on his face, his greenish-blue eyes gleaming oddly under the fluorescent lights. 

Bentley looked down at his ratty red tennis shoes, at his vigorously bouncing knee. “No.”

He felt Jason’s eyes on him, and could practically feel the smirk on his face when he replied: “You sure? Because you look like you’re trying to pedal a broken bicycle.”

Bentley forced his knee to stop moving. “Sorry.”

“Don’t apologize,” Jason said, patting Bentley’s knee once, quickly. “Just… really think about it. I can’t come in with you, so it’ll just be you, him, and a cop. If you really don’t want to do it, that’s okay.”

Bentley let out a puff of air. “I’m going to do it.”

“Okay,” He saw Jason nod in his peripheral, and after a moment of silence, he leaned in close and continued: “But if anything happens, I’ll blow that door off its hinges before the cops even know what’s happening.”

Bentley cracked a smile at that, and Jason sat back with a triumphant smirk.

Waiting felt like both an eternity and a split second. One minute, he and Jason were sitting alone in the hall, the next, he was being ushered through a big, thick door by a female officer who was relaying ground rules and reinforcing the fact that Bentley only had twenty minutes to talk to his dad.

“You don’t have to stay for all twenty,” Jason interrupted as Bentley was whisked down the hall, which the officer didn’t really appreciate. The woman kept talking but Bentley couldn’t really focus; he was too busy trying to peer into the visitation area. 

The long, barren hallway turned into a long, barren room, lined with plexiglass booths. There were no other people in there. Each booth had a phone and desk on either side, separated in the middle by a wall of glass. There was a sign above every window that said: please don’t scratch the glass!

Bentley steeled when he spotted a mop of red hair that matched his to the tee, sitting behind one of the windows. He breathed in and out. His father couldn’t get to him behind the glass, right? Bentley didn’t see any holes or doors or ways for him to get into the room. The police officer, whose hair Bentley could now see was black, closed the door to the room and went to stand along the wall.

With a final quick glance up to her, Bentley made his way to the rickety spinning stool across from his father. Third booth from the right.

He looked… different. Not so clean cut. His hair was longer — he’d always been so anal about trimming his hair that Bentley was thoroughly shocked at the sight of the shaggy red mop that looked a lot like his own now. He had a little facial hair, too, patchy and strange looking. He was wearing a matching set of gray clothes, not a pressed suit, and when Bentley sat down, his shiny brown eyes bored into the child’s head like an electric drill.

Bentley, when he sat down, moved his feet up to the highest rung on the stool in an attempt to make himself smaller. Cut the head off the snake, right? That’s what he was here to do; stop the operation in its tracks. So… how was he supposed to manipulate the manipulator? (In hindsight, maybe he should’ve thought a little bit more before he decided to go to the prison.)

His father picked up the black wall-phone on his side of the glass and brought it up to his ear. Talking openly about, like, crime and stuff was pretty stupid, though, wasn’t it?

Bentley lifted his hands, finger-spelling: sign.

His father put the phone back.

A moment of silence passed where Bentley’s father just sort of watched him closely; contemplating. His eyes scoured what had to be every inch of his son’s appearance before he lifted his hands and signed: ‘You’ve grown.’

Bentley thought long and hard about how he should respond. He considered saying: Yeah, food helps with that, but decided against it. Instead, he just bobbed his fist yes. This was already way harder than he’d thought. How was he supposed to talk to him? After he’d… you know. After all, his father never really gave up, even in jail.

Bentley kept his gaze trained on his father’s hands like he used to, avoiding eye contact like the plague. He didn’t want to see his face. 

The hands moved. ‘How is school?’

Bentley breathed in and out, fingerspelling: ‘Fine.’ Well, besides having a murdering mad scientist (who moves at his father’s command.) for a teacher, and a bully who thought it would be funny to lock Bentley in the janitor's closet. That and the fact that he was now in the public eye for living with Bruce. He didn’t even want to know what the news reports looked like lately. Bruce Wayne’s newest child, gone without a trace?

John nodded. Another brief moment of staring ensued, before he brought his hands up again. ‘Made any friends?’

Not besides the ones you tried to kill. Bentley blinked a few times, moving his fingers calculatively. ‘Yes. But you already knew that.’

His father’s expression grew curious, in an arrogant sort of way, like he was raising his brows to say oh, really? Bentley only looked at him for a second before his eyes drifted back to the table his father’s elbows were resting on. 

‘I know you’re still talking to Dr. Keene,’ Bentley signed subtly, glancing at the officer behind them, who looked anything but engaged. ‘And I’m sure you know by now that he had us at the facility. Then he didn’t.’

His father said nothing. Typical, and a great way to piss off an already sort of simmering-in-his-own-silent-rage kind of child. 

Bentley kept his hands moving, lest they stop. ‘You’re hurting innocent people just to get back at me? I never did anything to you.’

John lifted his hands, his fingers twitching oddly for a moment before he signed: ‘It wasn’t about you. It was about Bruce.’

Bentley fought the urge to roll his eyes. ‘But-’

‘Bruce is the reason your mother and sister are dead. And then he came along and took you away from me, too,’ His father’s hands were sort of trembling, now, his expression intense and hard. Bentley could feel his eyes but still wouldn’t look right at them.

‘You didn’t even want me. What sense is there in attacking someone who got the kid you never wanted? Now you don’t have to deal with me,’ Bentley signed, looking at his father’s hands, shaking his head subtly. ‘You hate me, and now I’m somebody else’s problem. You should be happy.’

‘I don’t hate you,’ Was his father’s reply. Bentley saw his expression change. ‘I love you.’

The child breathed in through his nose. Not this, not again. Get the conversation back on track — control it. ‘No, you don’t.’

‘You can’t tell me what I do and don’t love; you don’t know,’ His father signed. ‘I love you.’

‘No, you don’t, and I don’t care. That’s not what I’m here to talk about,’ Bentley tried, but his signs went unnoticed. 

‘I do, Bentley. I love you,’

Bentley inhaled sharply, looking down at the table with a few blinks. The last time his father had said that, it was a big fat lie. What had Bentley ever done to deserve all of that? All of this? What did he do not to deserve his father’s love?

Still, he caved for the patented back-and-forth arguing game. ‘You don’t.’

‘You just don’t want to accept the fact that maybe you’re wrong.’ His father signed, lowering his head so it was more in Bentley’s view. ‘You don’t want to accept the fact that I can change. That I can be more than the monster under your bed.’

What if his father could change? Not that Bentley thought he was. He was still a crazy psycho killer. But what if, one day, he wasn’t? What if, one day, he really was more than the monster from Bentley’s past? What if one day he really wanted to love him? 

What if he wanted him back one day?

Bentley tried to push the thoughts out of his mind — he was on a mission. He was the Puppeteer. Right? His father couldn’t really love him. Right?

‘You asked me in the warehouse why I didn’t love you, and I’m telling you now, that I do,’ His father continued to sign, and Bentley’s eyes began to burn. He tried to push it away with everything in him, but something didn’t want to let go of the hope. The hope that maybe his real dad could love him again. ‘I did some awful things to you out of my own pain. Terrible things I would never wish upon any child in this world. I don’t know if I’ll ever do enough good to make up for it, but the one thing I can make damn well sure I do is let you know that I do love you.’

Bentley looked down at the table. It had been almost a year. Could someone change so fast? A year was long enough, wasn’t it?

‘You’re not lying this time?’ He signed in return.

‘No, Bentley. I didn’t see it before, but I see it now — getting you taken away, coming here, spending my time thinking, reflecting… It helped me realize that you were the best thing that ever happened to me. The only thing I really wanted. Needed.’

Bentley shook his head, blinking away the beginnings of tears. Rational thought and logic said he was lying. Hope said something else. ‘I don’t believe you.’

To the child’s surprise, his father smiled. Actually, literally smiled. With teeth and all. Teeth. Bentley’s father never smiled, let alone at him. ‘That’s okay. I’ll just keep saying it. I love you.’

Bentley shook his head, breathing in, swallowing thickly. ‘Stop.’

‘I love you, Bentley. I love you so much,’

‘Stop lying,’ He tried again.

‘I love you,’

‘Stop it,’

‘Look up at me. Please?’

That strange little sliver of hope had Bentley lifting his head on command, his brown eyes meeting the identical ones of his father. His father had tears — actual, honest tears — beginning to glimmer at the bottom of his eyes, a smile playing on his lips.

‘People can change, Bentley. You’re surrounded by them. Damian Wayne went from being a murderer to a superhero. Jason Todd went from rage-killing to a full-time older brother,’ He explained with his hands, smile staying all the while. ‘I can change, Bentley. I want to change. I just need you to have faith in me.’

Bentley stared, dumbfounded, vision slightly obscured by the liquid in his eyes.

‘I,’ His father separated the signs for emphasis with a smile, and an honest to goodness tear went down the man’s face. ‘Love. You.’ 

All that reliable rational thought and logic went out the window, and Bentley brought a hand to his mouth. Of all the things he expected to do while talking to his father, crying was not one of them. But here he was. Crying. (He probably should’ve expected to cry anyways. He was basically a professional at it.)

For a moment, he just rested his elbows on the table and put his head in his hands. So many red flags were waving in his mind, alarm bells sounding, lights flashing, telling him his father was lying, deceiving him, but he couldn’t really bring himself to accept it. He couldn’t. Not when his father had just told him he’d loved him ten times in one conversation. Not when Bentley was so close to feeling what he’d always wanted to feel. His father loving him was different from Dick or Bruce, it was… more. It didn’t feel the same. Different, long overdue, and… really, really, really, really good.

So, there he sat for a solid five minutes at least, his palms buried in his eye sockets in an attempt to keep the tears in. (It didn’t work. When did it ever?) He was biting his tongue to keep silent in fear Jason really would hear him crying through the wall and come break it down. 

Logic told him to stop. To pay attention. To use his Puppeteer mind to see through everything his father was saying. That if he really had changed, if he really loved him, he wouldn’t be doing all of this.

The part of him that wanted so badly to be loved didn’t let him. 

Because what if his dad really did love him?

There was a subtle peck on the glass, and Bentley looked up again, finally letting his (watery, and red.) brown eyes meet his father’s and stay there. He was still smiling, kind of like Bruce always did. 

‘It’s been a year, and you still crumble under the weight of three small words. I thought I taught you better than that.’

Bentley sat up, wiping at his eyes, and glanced around the room warily. His father’s smile fell into nothing — something cold, like Bentley was used to. This wasn’t… he hadn’t… again?

‘You were lying?’

‘I thought you lived with detectives, Bentley,’ He signed, one eyebrow raised in a triumphant manner. He leaned in close to the glass, and Bentley instinctively moved away. ‘Listen, and listen closely, because this is the last thing I’m saying to you.’

Bentley looked down at his shaky hands. That strange feeling came again, the same one he felt at the Manor. He heard water moving through the pipes in the ceiling. He felt his blood pumping.

‘Even if you get Dr. Keene arrested, even if you kill Charlie and release the other children and destroy this entire operation from the ground up, you’re going to lose. If I can’t destroy the Wayne’s alone, I’ll just watch all of Gotham burn instead,’ He signed, a strangely competent look coming across his face like he was having a normal business transaction. ‘We have a plan B that you won’t touch, that you won’t even know about until it’s too late. Think of it as a boss fight in a video game. It’s coming. And you can’t stop it.’

Bentley exhaled a shaky breath, wiping at his eyes.

‘If you find a way to stop this — if you make us change to plan B, all the thousands of lives lost here in Gotham are on your head,’ His father smiled a crooked smile, different from the last. ‘There’s no way for you to win, Bentley. This is the end. It's your choice how many people come out of it.’

Bentley’s hands were shaking when he signed: ‘You’re not going to win.’

His father laughed. Literally laughed, out loud. ‘If you really think so, then keep your eye on the news channels. If you keep your ears open you might hear the warning call before the end comes.’

Bentley looked down at his own lap. 

‘And Bentley…’ His father signed, and the child looked up one last time. ‘Just to clear things up… not a single atom of my very being has ever loved you… and not a single atom ever will.’

That was the moment a part of Bentley… died. Something inside of him shifted. The little boy that wanted his dad to love him so badly faded away to nothing, and left something oddly empty and wrong in its wake. Something like rage, but muffled by something else he couldn’t place right then.

Bentley stood up from the stool, letting out a breath of air. ‘That’s okay. Bruce loves me better than you ever could. Don’t you ever get tired of being second best?’

He didn’t wait for his father’s reply, but turned to leave the room.

“Oh, and Bentley…”

He turned back to his father one last time, who was standing now, with a smile. “When the elements are pitted against one another, fire always wins.”

Bentley said nothing. The officer led him out of the room.

When Bentley made it back into the hallway and Jason noticed his red rimmed eyes, he looked like he was going to kill someone.

“Bentley?” He questioned, standing up when they got close. “What happened?”

“I think they had a heartfelt conversation. I couldn’t really hear it, of course — I didn’t know the boy didn’t talk,” Said the officer, patting Bentley’s shoulder. “He’s all yours. Make sure you check up with security on your way out.”

Jason took Bentley’s shoulder and replied with a: “Yeah…”

The walk out of the prison felt like an eternity. Somehow, Bentley was feeling everything and nothing at all. It felt like everything negative inside of him — rage, sadness, despair, desperation, terror, loneliness, disappointment, frustration, a whole entire life’s worth of guilt — it was like it was all broiling and fighting to get out, but the lid of the pot was closed too tight. Like it was seeping out of crevices and waiting for the day Bentley Whittaker breaks.

“What did he say to you?” Jason practically demanded, his hand staying firmly on Bentley’s left shoulder as they walked through the not-very-crowded parking lot. He had a very deadpan, sort of pissed off look on his face. 

Bentley looked everywhere but at Jason, dutifully shutting down the urges to cry or throw a tantrum or punch something or burn down a house. “I just… can we just go home? Please? I don’t want to be here anymore.”

“Did he threaten you?” Jason continued, squeezing Bentley’s shoulder as they split to go on either side of the car. Jason climbed in the driver’s seat, and Bentley hopped into the passenger’s side.

“No,” Bentley replied once they were both in Jason’s car, buckling his seatbelt. Not directly, anyway…

“Why have you been crying?”

Bentley looked down at his lap as the car started up. “Can we just go home?”

Jason didn’t argue.

—

dedicated to @sassenashsworld 💚

—

tag list! (If you want me to remove or add you, ask in comments!)

@fleur-alise @sarcopterygiian @flyrobinflyy @skylathescholar @gayboss-too-close-to-the-sun @xiaonothere

[maccreadysbaby]

A Hundred Ways to Become a Wayne

batfamily + oc insert

tw: much angst, psychological torture???

wanna read more? here’s the table of contents!

want to read the first fic in the hundred days series so you understand what’s going on here? here it is!

geez you guys. just geez. this is so intense. this chapter, as well as asten and jasons little moment made me cry while writing them :,(

part twenty-two

❝ TOO CLOSE TO HOME ❞

TUESDAY — AUGUST 11 — 3:31PM

BENTLEY HADN’T CONSIDERED JUST HOW QUICKLY HIS DAY COULD TURN DISASTROUS.

Hey, buddy. There’s been a change of plans — I want you home after school today. I’ll explain when you get here.

That was the text Bentley got from Bruce exactly seven minutes before Spanish class ended, exactly seven minutes before he was supposed to go home with Nico, so he could make the burner calls with him and Asten.

Bruce had already said yes to Bentley’s fake science project earlier that day — a lie he felt pretty terrible about — but apparently, now, it was a no.

At first, he was terrified he’d be getting in trouble. Had Bruce found out about Dr. Keene’s phone? About the cabin? About the burners? Did he know their entire plan from beginning to end? He probably did since he was the best detective in the world, and if so, Bentley was screwed.

But it wasn’t that. It was much, much worse.

Now, twenty-five minutes after the end of school, when Bentley, Damian, and Duke walked into the Manor, it was evident that something was wrong. The entire house was silent. Not the people-in-the-distance kind of silent, but the could-hear-a-pin-drop-from-the-other-end-of-the-Manor kind of silent. Nothing in the golden entryway was out of place or messed up, but the quiet gave the place quite an eerie feeling. As far as they knew, Dick, Jason, Bruce, Alfred, and Tim were all home. But there was no noise, no anything that would imply anyone had been there in a while. Not even the dogs or Alfred the cat made a peep at the sound of the front door. And Bentley… didn’t like it. He didn’t like it so much he ran a hand through his red hair and grabbed onto the hem of Duke’s blazer with the other. Their trio of matching Gotham Academy uniforms would not make for good outfits to die in.

“Titus?” Damian called through the house, shrugging off his backpack and dropping it at the door. Bentley had barely seen the giant gray dog since Damian started getting angry — and it seemed he wouldn’t be seeing him now, either. Titus didn’t come running to Damian’s call like he usually did. Like he always did.

That freaked Bentley out even more. He was pretty sure Titus would chew his way through a wall if Damian was calling him from the other side, but now, not a thing in the Manor moved. Not a sound pierced the air.

“Duke…” Bentley muttered, his voice hardly audible. He jumped a mile when Duke’s hand landed on his shoulder, and the older boy peeled his own backpack off, laying it gently on the floor. 

“Let’s go to the cave,” He whispered back, squeezing Bentley’s shoulder.

Bentley slid his bag off, too. He wasn’t exactly sure what Duke’s metahuman superpowers were — seeing the future or something — but he hoped they were online. Just in case. There was no telling what was going on, why the Manor was so quiet.

Damian and Duke started down the nearest hallway — the one with the den, library, and cave entrance through Bruce’s office. Bentley trailed along behind them, his heartbeat loud in his ears as he stepped ever-so-softly, eyes flicking here and there. The end of the hallway was dark and creepy. They weren’t ready for a fight, not in the slightest, although Damian’s fingers were twitching by his side like he was subconsciously searching for a sword. What if someone had broken in? 

It felt like an eternity before Duke pushed open the door to Bruce’s office, and they all peeked inside. Everything was in order. The desk was neat, the bookshelves were organized, the lights were off, and the grandfather clock was…

Open. 

The entrance to the Batcave was open.

Bentley breathed in, the familiar feeling of terror prickling at his skin. This was… so wrong. Everything was wrong. No one left the cave open. And why was it so cold in the house? Bentley only just realized that the prickling on his skin wasn’t terror alone, but also, the temperature in the Manor. It was cold like someone left the front door open for too long. Why was the cave open? Where was everybody? 

“Don’t worry, Babybird,”

Bentley brought a hand up to his forehead as a voice he knew all too well rang inside of his skull, sending an echo of vertigo through his head. She was here. The Secret Keeper. She was… she was…

In the Manor.

Duke and Damian filed into Bruce’s office, and Bentley followed slowly behind. There was something at the end of the hall. Someone, standing there. He could see the silhouette in the dark. It was a girl. It wasn’t Steph. It wasn’t Cass. Her eyes were glowing an amber-gold in the darkness, and she was staring at him.

“I won’t tell your secrets,”

She smiled a twisted, stitched smile, one Bentley could hardly see that terrified him all the same.

She was right there.

Bentley shouted in terror, swerving into Bruce’s office so quickly that he whammed into Duke face-first, thumping onto the hardwood from the force.

“Bentley!”

“She’s in the hallway!” He squeaked.

Everyone was suddenly moving. Bentley was trying to scurry away from the door at the same time Duke was trying to get between him and the hall, and Damian was going for Bruce’s desk, ducking under it and re-emerging with an actual katana in his hand. 

In a flash, Damian ran for the hallway, but Duke grabbed onto his arm with a shrill: “No. The light. I saw-”

“Unhand me,” Damian ordered, wrenching his forearm from Duke’s grip and jogging out of the room before he could finish.

“Damian, no!” Duke was moving to get Damian out of the hall, and Bentley was still pushing himself backwards on the floor until his back thunked against Bruce’s desk. Oh God, oh God, oh God. They were going to die.

When Bentley looked up, Damian was just standing there.

And his eyes were amber.

It was only a split second, but Bentley would probably remember it for the rest of his life — the way Damian stood there, blankly, his fiery-yet-cold greenish-blue eyes nothing more than empty, hollow as they shone the exact same amber as the Secret Keeper’s. 

And then he fell, the katana clattering off to the side. Duke was close enough to catch him, just perfectly, like he knew it was about to happen. He dragged Damian back into the office and slammed the giant wooden door, locking it behind him. 

“Don’t worry, Babybird. I won’t tell him your secrets,”

“C’mon, Bentley, stay close to me,” Duke ordered, hefting Damian up into his arms bridal-style. Bentley’s brain was hardly able to function with the Secret Keeper’s voice bouncing around in it, and he didn’t move. His heart was pounding and pounding and pounding in his ears and it was getting so hard to breathe.

The Secret Keeper was in the Manor. Talking to him, in the Manor.

They were going to die.

“Bentley! I need you to stay with me, little dude. Hey,” Duke crouched down, somewhat awkwardly since he was holding Damian, and his hand landed on Bentley’s shoulder. Their gazes locked, both pairs of brown eyes searching the other for a moment. One full of terror, the other soft with understanding layered over fear and determination. “I know it’s scary, but I need you to stay with me, okay?”

Bentley’s gaze fell to Damian, who was hanging limp in Duke’s arms, his eyes open but unseeing with waves of amber crawling across his irises like lightning. He was staring at Bentley, but he wasn’t seeing him. Damian looked…

Dead.

Bentley was suddenly back in that nightmare he’d had so long ago, tugging Damian’s lifeless body into his lap by his Robin suit. 

“Stop it. Get up! You’re Robin, get up!”

All he could see were Damian’s lifeless eyes, staring at him but not seeing. Damian couldn’t die… he was Robin, he couldn’t die.

Bentley couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t think. Couldn’t see. Couldn’t stop crying. He was on his knees, surrounded by the corpses of the Wayne’s that his father had killed in that nightmare so long ago. Damian was looking at him but his eyes weren’t seeing. Everyone’s eyes were open but they weren’t actually seeing anything. They were dead. They were dead. They all had amber pulsing in their irises and they were all dead. His father wasn’t in the doorway anymore, it was her. It was her with her amber eyes and they were all dead.

“Shh, shh, shh… I’ve got you, babybird. I’ve got you. I’ve got you,” 

They were all dead. They were all dead.

“Bentley, buddy, I've got you,”

Bentley couldn’t even think coherently enough to realize that the voice wasn't hers. He couldn’t stop seeing Damian’s amber eyes.

“I’ve got you, kiddo. Open your eyes,”

Open your eyes. That’s what he needed Damian to do — open his eyes, look at him again, not be dead. Damian couldn’t be dead, not after Bentley knew a way to fix their relationship. He couldn’t die. He couldn’t die. Robin couldn’t die.

“Bentley, can you try to open your eyes and look at me?”

Robin can’t die.

“I’ve got you, babybird. You’re safe now,”

He wasn’t safe. No one was safe anymore.

Someone was humming.

It wasn’t a song Bentley knew. He didn’t know many songs — but it was a song he might’ve heard before. He was moving. Only a little, back and forth, and something was touching him. 

His thoughts began to swirl like water going down a drain, Damian’s dead, amber eyes melding with the rest of everything in his head. What was going on? And who was humming? Was something touching his hair?

He was very… aware of his own existence. He could feel his heartbeat pulsing in his fingertips, his chest, his toes, his head. He could feel the terror twisting in his stomach, the air moving a bit-too-quickly in and out of his lungs. The wetness on his face. The something warm he was up against, the fingertips moving through his hair, the gentle rocking that the something warm was doing. The faintest of vibrations he could feel that coincided with the humming he heard. The fact that his eyelids seemed glued shut and he couldn’t see anything.

Slowly, like he was trying to pull open a tomb that had been sealed eons ago, Bentley opened his eyes. He was greeted by a blur of bright. Bright everything that swirled around for a moment before it started to come into focus.

He was in the medbay, facing the door to the rest of the cave. Sitting in a chair, but not actually in a chair, because someone else was in the chair and he was on their lap. Their fingers were moving through his hair with such a familiar rhythm that he knew exactly who it was.

“Dick,” He whispered, his voice and vision impaired by tears that were still coming without his permission.

“Hey there, kiddo,” 

Bentley blinked, looking at his own hands that were balled up in Dick’s blue t-shirt. “…What happened?”

“You’ve been having an anxiety attack, bud. For about twenty minutes now,”

Bentley looked up just far enough to meet the crystalline blue eyes that were so undeniably Dick’s. He had the vague intention of speaking again, but another hand landed on his head, this one from behind.

“Hey there, chum,”

Bentley breathed in and out shakily at the sound of Bruce’s voice, glancing at the room around them through his tears.

Everyone was down there. Barbara was at the Batcomputer, laser-focused on the screen. Cass and Steph were watching over her shoulder. Alfred was moving back and forth from machine to hospital bed, and Tim was in a chair just to the left of Dick’s, his leg bouncing almost impossibly fast. Duke was pacing behind them. Bruce was in a chair only a few feet to Bentley’s right, his hand still resting in his hair, right at the edge of a hospital bed.

The hospital bed had someone in it. 

And so did the one next to it.

The one Bruce had taken up residence next to held Damian. He was laying eerily still, attached to several machines that were beeping and whirring. His chest was rising and falling, much to Bentley’s relief, and the heart monitor next to him was beeping at a normal pace… but he wasn’t awake. He was just… laying there. Unmoving.

Bentley startled when the person in the other bed started screaming.

His eyes landed on the violently thrashing figure of Jason Todd, his wrists, ankles, and waist restrained to the hospital bed by thick leather straps Bentley didn’t even know they had. His eyes were closed, but he was throwing his weight around so forcefully that the whole bed was clacking and moving when he did. He was absolutely drenched in sweat, his entire gray t-shirt stained a darker shade, his hair wet and floppy and very unusual looking. He was breathing so hard and fast it rivaled Nico’s asthma, his expression constantly twisting between pain, rage, despair, and agony, over and over and over. 

Bentley gasped lightly, turning his head back toward Dick when the burning in his eyes threatened to double. Bruce’s hand left his head, and Bentley thought he might’ve heard him stand. “What… what happened? To Jason?”

Dick sighed lightly, gently pressing Bentley’s head against his shoulder as he carded his fingers through his hair. “Secret Keeper got him the same way she got me.”

Bentley sniffled lightly, glancing over just far enough to look back at Damian, laying so stiff it looked like a funeral. Bruce was standing between the beds now, and seemed to be talking to Jason, who was calming. “…And Damian?”

Dick breathed in. “Yeah. Dami, too.”

They fell silent when another round of screaming and bed clacking came from Jason. Dick didn’t do that when he was unconscious, so what was Jason seeing? Bentley must’ve recoiled at the noise, because Dick kissed his hair. “It’s okay, babybird. He’ll be okay.”

Dick didn’t sound entirely too convinced.

Bentley just stayed there for a while, fighting the urge to cry and keeping his face hidden every time Jason started screaming again. Bruce had moved his chair in the middle of the two beds. Bentley wasn’t sure when.

“She was… the Secret Keeper, she was upstairs,” Bentley muttered after a while. “She was here.”

Dick hadn’t ceased petting his hair. “It’s okay. Bruce and Cass cleared the Manor after you guys came down. Wherever she is, it’s not here.”

But the Manor is huge, he wanted to argue, but he didn’t exactly feel like arguing. Everything felt like a battle. Why was it so hard to just live? He’d been at school less than an hour ago, finishing off a more-or-less normal day of classes, and now? Now a raging supervillain had broken into the Manor, terror-coma-fied two of the closest things he had to brothers, and Bentley just had to have another anxiety attack about it. Why couldn’t he just have a normal life? Was that so hard?

He started crying.

“Why is this happening to us?” He managed between his quiet cries, bringing his sleeves up to scrub at his eyes. “I just… I can’t… I just want to live with you.”

That statement seemed to take hold of Dick for a moment, because at least five seconds of silence passed before he replied: “I know. I know you do, kiddo. It’ll all be over soon.”

Something like rage bubbled up in Bentley’s chest in place of his hopelessness, though the tears kept coming. “That’s what everyone keeps saying, but it’s a lie! It’s not getting better, it’s not ending, it’s just getting worse!”

Jason started screaming again, fueling Bentley’s tears until he was well and truly sobbing into Dick’s blue t-shirt. 

Screw life.

Dick tried a quiet: “It’ll be okay.”

“Stop saying that,” Bentley choked, somewhat venomous but mostly pitiful. 

“I love you,” Was what Dick resigned to, just like when he didn’t know what to say to Tim at the end of their conversation. 

Go away, Tim had said.

“I love you, too,” Bentley half-whispered. “But I hate everything else.”

Jason calmed, and the timer until he started screaming again began to tick. Dick kept on stroking Bentley’s hair while he cried for everything he hadn’t cried about yet. Part of him wished they weren’t superheroes. That his father had just wanted to destroy Bruce for being Bruce, that Bentley had gotten shoved into a normal family with a normal life. Everything else was exhausting. Draining. Maybe they wouldn’t be targeted so badly if they were just a family of civilians.

Jason started screaming, again. He started his ultra-violent thrashing, too, shimmying the hospital bed across the floor of the medbay with clacks and scrapes of metal on concrete. 

Tim abruptly stood from his spot beside Dick, looking rather sick. “I’m gonna go upstairs.”

It didn’t take a detective to realize that he looked like he might pass out. His skin was pasty, and his eyes were dull and sunken. He also looked kind of… green. 

“It… it would probably be best for all of us to stay down here together, Timmy,” Dick tried, but Tim didn’t listen, making his way out of the medbay and into the rest of the cave.

For the second time that day, Bentley watched one of his brothers hit the floor. Except no one was there to catch Tim when he went down.

Everyone seemed to move. Duke, Cass, And Steph all flinched in Tim’s direction, although none of them were close enough to actually catch him. Even Dick jostled Bentley around in his lap by nearly shooting out of the chair. Bruce stood quickly, holding a hand out toward Dick, rushing to Tim’s side.

Bentley clung ever-tighter to Dick as the tears came doubly as hard, listening to Bruce fuss over getting Tim in a third hospital bed, flinching at Jason’s screams, and watching Damian’s hands ball up and relax over and over against the sheets. The stress of everything seemed to build in his head, tighter and tighter and tighter until…

The world faded away.

—

When Bentley woke up, he was on a cot, on the floor of the medbay. There was a scratchy hospital-like blanket thrown over him, and a quick glance around revealed that Dick had nodded off in the chair they’d been sitting in. His arms were crossed over his chest and his head was down, his black hair hanging over his forehead, blue eyes hidden from sight. Alfred was on the farthest end of the medbay, running tests, it seemed.

Duke, Steph, Cass, and Barbara were out near the batcomputer, taking up residence on the floor. (And in a wheelchair.) Barbara and Duke were speaking quietly, And Steph looked to be asleep, her head pillowed on Cass’s lap. There was a map of Gotham on the Batcomputer behind them, red dots flashing near the docks of Gotham Harbor. Did that mean the burner calls had worked?

And now three beds had a Wayne in them. Closest to Bentley laid Damian, stiff with still curling and uncurling fists. Then came Jason, who wasn’t screaming, but was still writhing around on the bed like he was covered in ants. In the third bed came the small, fragile looking Tim, who was unconscious and still. He was hooked up to a lot more stuff than the other two.

And sitting right in the midst of all the beds, like he couldn’t make up his mind, was Bruce.

He was on the edge of his chair, his elbows resting on his knees, eyes trained on the floor below his feet. Bentley was sure he’d never seen him looking so… lost. He was fiddling with a ring that sat around one of his fingers, spinning it over and over to the rhythm of Damian’s heart monitor.

Bentley’s hurt for him. For everyone. For the whole world, at this point. What was Bruce supposed to do, watching three of his kids suffer like that?

Bentley pushed himself off of the little flat cot and onto his feet, earning him a little glance from Bruce. Neither of them spoke as the child padded across the room, stopping only when he made it to the man’s chair.

“I’m cold,” Was what he said, eyes flicking down to his feet. He actually meant I want to try and make you feel better with a little hint of please hold me, life sucks. He prepared himself for a rejection and walk of shame back to the cot — that’s what his father would’ve done.

Bruce leaned back and scanned Bentley with his gray-blue eyes, opening his arms up. 

“So am I,”

—

dedicated to @sassenashsworld 💚

—

tag list! (If you want me to remove or add you, ask in comments!)

@fleur-alise @sarcopterygiian @cademygod

[maccreadysbaby]

A Hundred Ways to Become a Wayne

batfamily + oc insert

tw: none

wanna read more? here’s the table of contents!

want to read the first fic in the hundred days series so you understand what’s going on here? here it is!

yall i am so sorry, i’ve been working on writing other things. updates will probably be more spread out now, but bentley’s back baby!

part seventeen

❝ REVELATION ❞

SUNDAY — AUGUST 9 — 3:17AM

“DON’T WORRY, BABYBIRD. I WON’T TELL YOUR SECRETS,”

Bentley woke up, standing in the foyer of Nico Rockefeller’s house. Which was strange, considering he knew for a fact that he’d fallen asleep in his own room, with Nico and Asten right next to him.

He’d never actually been in the Rockefellers’ house, but somehow, some part of him knew this was it. It looked similar to the Manor, actually. The whole foyer was wrapped in beautiful mahogany wainscoting, with dual staircases leading up to the second floor, and hallways positioned around that led to other parts of the house. A pair of giant double doors sat right in the middle of the stairs, leading to a seemingly important room. 

Bentley blinked several times. Why was he in Nico’s house? And where had his friends gone?

He stepped forward just a little, toward the huge wooden doors. Intricate and detailed pictures of Greek gods had been carved into them. Hephaestus, the Greek god of fire was in the center of the left door, his arms outstretched. The entire door was decorated with engravings of terrifying flames, of cities falling into ruins under his immense power. On the right door, Poseidon, Greek god of water, and Aether, Greek god of air, were both facing him, their arms outstretched like they were trying to reach out and bring him home. The fire trailed onto their door, too, but lessened as it neared them, replaced my waves and swirls that signified water and wind. Off to the side hovered Hermes, the messenger of the gods, alone with his hands bound in shackles. Bentley lifted his right hand and delicately brushed his fingertips over the waves made by Poseidon.

“Yeah, I’ll find it. When did you say you’d be home?”

Bentley flinched when Nico’s voice sounded from somewhere above him. He backed away from the doors like he was committing a crime, glancing around, then up at the staircases. Nico was descending the left one with his phone pressed tightly to his ear. Bentley just stood there awkwardly in the center of the foyer, fiddling with the hem of his jacket sleeve as he waited for Nico to notice him.

Only… he didn’t. Not when he came down the stairs, not when he turned toward the doors, not when he walked so closely past Bentley that he felt the air gust from his movement. It was like he was a ghost. 

“Nico?” He tried, but the boy didn’t seem to hear him.

“Okay. Love you, too. Bye,” He finalized, ending the phone call and sliding the device in his pocket as she shoved the large doors open. On the other side stood an office, more extravagant than any office Bentley had ever seen. There was a massive, solid glass desk in the middle of the room, completely clear so that Bentley could see what was in the drawers. It was sitting atop a rug that looked old, almost tribal, with geometric shapes and midwestern colors. The color of the walls was hidden by bookshelves that covered every inch of available space. There were no windows, the whole room illuminated by a large, beaded light fixture instead. All the books and trinkets that lined the shelves looked old, priceless.

Nico walked in like he’d done it a million times, striding to the other side of the clear desk and pulling out the matching clear chair that sat with it. He steadied it against the bookshelves and climbed on top of it, thumbing through the spines of books like he was searching for a very specific one.

Nico looked… the exact same as he had at Bentley’s house. He was even wearing the same gray hoodie and sweats. What was going on?

Bentley stayed quiet, drifting into the doorway of the office. The farther he went, the more old collectibles and books and antiques were revealed — things so old he couldn’t really tell what they were. He watched in silence as Nico made a small ah-ha sound, pulling a red book from the shelf. A couple others fell off with it, thumping on the carpet with muted sounds.

“Ugh,” He grumbled. Bentley, still silent, said nothing as the blonde hopped off the chair and bent down to pick up the dropped books. A brown one was laying open, facing down, its pages on the rug. The second, a dark blue hardcover, hadn’t even opened.

Nico picked up both books, turning toward the shelves to return them to their rightful spots, but then he paused, glaring at the blue one with narrowed eyes. He started shaking it like a snow globe.

Bentley furrowed his brows. What in the world was he doing?

Nico kept shaking the book strangely, and then Bentley caught onto exactly why he was shaking it — it was rattling. The book was rattling. Bentley blinked, completely sure he was losing his mind. How had he ended up in Nico’s house, anyway? And why couldn’t he see him?

Nico plopped the blue book on the desk and tossed the other to the side, moving to open it — but the blue hardcover didn’t budge. He sat it up on the spine and pulled at both covers, back and front, but still, it didn’t open.

Bentley moved forward ever-so-slightly, taking a spot on the opposite side of the desk from Nico. Why would someone make a book you couldn’t open? That rattled? To say Bentley was confused was an understatement — for some reason, he felt rather dumb.

Nico continued to pry and pull on the blue covers to no avail. He then took to examining the pages on the side, running his fingernail over them. Bentley then drifted around the desk just a bit, toward Nico’s left side.

“Huh?” He vocalized as his fingernail slid into a crack between the cover and unmoving pages. Bentley watched quietly as he pulled open the clear desk drawer, grabbing something that looked strangely like a knife. A weird, thin knife, with an ornate metal hilt. He’d seen Alfred use something similar once — to open the mail. Perhaps Alfred wasn’t using a weird knife then, either, but a thing that looked like a knife that was actually meant for opening the mail? Why else would Nico’s parents have one in their office?

Nico grabbed the probably-not-a-knife and stabbed it into the little crack between the cover and strangely stiff pages, using his entire body as leverage. Bentley flinched when the book flew open with a harsh bang against the glass desk.

It wasn’t a book at all, actually — it was a box disguised as a book. Very clever, very smart, very… spy-like, in Bentley’s opinion. Like something Bruce would have in his library. The inside of the book was hollow, the pages fake, and inside was a myriad of papers and small objects. Intrigued, Bentley stepped closer. 

Nico pinched his brows together, pulling out papers and objects one at a time. First was a pin. A pin that was supposed to attach to someone's shirt, with an old looking piece of torn and faded fabric attached to the back. The pin itself was a burnished bronze, with a lightning bolt down the center. It looked like something Bentley had seen before, but he couldn’t place it.

Nico pulled out a large envelope second, and — much to his confusion — it had his name written on the front in big, loopy writing. Bentley watched in silence, inching ever-closer as the blonde used the same little not-knife to open it.

He pulled out three papers, each folded neatly. Two were pristine and clean, the other, ratty, torn, and slightly crumbled. He unfolded the nicer two, and Bentley leaned in to read them.

The first one was a birth certificate. In big, bold letters, it read: NIKOLAI ELIJAH ROCKEFELLER. It had his birthday, his time of birth, his parents’ names, EDWARD ROCKEFELLER and JEAN AGRESTE-ROCKEFELLER.

The second of the nice papers was another birth certificate.

That was… also Nico’s?

Bentley leaned closer, genuinely confused at the same time Nico scrunched his face up. This certificate looked a little different than the first, like it was from a different place.

NIKOLAI ELIJAH ALLEN was the big name on the front. The parents' names listed were… BARTHOLOMEW ALLEN and CRYSTAL CONSTANTINE-ALLEN.

Okay, now Bentley was just really confused. As was Nico, who, with an exhale, shook his head in disbelief. He laid the certificates to the side and unfolded the ratty looking sheet of paper. It was scrawled with messy handwriting that Bentley could barely read. And even when he did decipher it, it didn’t make much sense.

Please take care of him Jean, Edward — Barry said you’d take good care of him. That you’re friends. Our timestream, our universe, dimension, reality, whatever it is… it’s falling apart at the seams — Barry says the only way to save him is to take him to a new one where his existence won’t be erased. His name is Nikolai. Nico. Just… please. Love him. Barry says he can take him back to his own timestream, to your timestream because of the Speed Force passed onto him from Bartholomew, I don’t know much about it… Bart’s worried you won’t be prepared for when it wakes up… Please don’t tell him about us until it wakes up. Nico. It’ll be better that way.

Bentley had never been more confused in his entire short life. Don’t tell him about us until it wakes up? It what? And a letter about worlds falling apart? Words that implied Nico was from a whole different universe? That his now parents weren't his parents, but his parents actually lived in a different dimension? Did that mean he was an alien? That there really was something more out there, something past the world Bentley could see?

Nico started crying, suddenly and pitifully like he had in the bathroom at school. Bentley wished he could reach out for him — but how would he feel him if he didn’t even know he was there?

A dull ache settled in the back of Bentley’s skull as the familiar feeling of vertigo started to take hold of him. The room started to teeter and spin, and he reached out to grab ahold of the desk when he started to fall, but apparently he missed, because he hit the floor anyways.

The beaded chandelier above him doubled and tripled as a stabbing pain shot from one ear to the other, black and white flecks of light dancing across his vision like it was snowing. The black flecks got bigger, and the sound of Nico crying grew more and more distant until everything fell black.

And Bentley jerked straight back into consciousness with a gasp. He blinked away the fatigue and pulsing pain behind his eyes, trying his hardest to focus, to breathe. He was in his dark bedroom, Nico snoring on the foot of the bed, and Asten… well, Asten wasn’t there. But the bathroom door was closed.

Bentley blinked a few more times to right his mind. A dream. It had been nothing more than a dream, despite it feeling so utterly real. His skull felt tight, strange, like a hot air balloon. It felt…

Exactly the same as it had in Bruce’s car, after the Secret Keeper invaded his mind to show him Asten’s memory. 

Had he just seen one of Nico’s memories? A memory where Nico was wearing the exact same clothes he was now? Could it have been a memory from, like, right before the Secret Keeper found him? The night before he called Asten?

Bentley grimaced as the throbbing in his head that had faded since the car ride came back full force, like someone was banging a gong inside of his skull. Nico hadn’t stirred even though Bentley had shaken the entire mattress with his flinch. 

What he saw in his dream was real, right? What he saw in his dream about Asten had seemed real enough, and Dick said he’d seen Bentley’s memories — so it was safe to assume it was real. That Nico was basically an alien from another universe.

He flopped back down on his pillow, rubbing his eyes with the heel of his palms. Superheroes, metahumans with powers, and now, universes and an alien that he’d managed to befriend.

He pushed it all out of his mind, for now, burying himself in his covers with a huff and willing his body to go back to sleep.

He didn’t realize that Asten never came out of the bathroom.

—

dedicated to @sassenashsworld 💚

—

tag list! (If you want me to remove or add you, ask in comments!)

@fleur-alise @sarcopterygiian @cademygod

[maccreadysbaby]

A Hundred Ways to Become a Wayne

batfamily + oc insert

tw: none

wanna read more? here’s the table of contents!

want to read the first fic in the hundred days series so you understand what’s going on here? here it is!

yall are gonna hate me in a few chapters

part twenty-four

❝ BREAKOUT ❞

SUNDAY — AUGUST 16 — 8:58PM

BY SUNDAY NIGHT, IT WAS SAFE TO SAY THAT BENTLEY WAS JUST A LITTLE, ITTY-BITTY, TEENY-WEENY BIT PISSED.

Five days. Five whole days and still, Tim, Damian, and Jason were nothing more than human-shaped lumps of misery in the cave. 

Dick, a conscious human-shaped lump of misery, was now probably the least Dick Grayson-ish Bentley had ever seen him. He seemed to float between the Manor and the cave on autopilot, his ocean blue eyes more of a murky, stagnant lake. Dick Grayson, the silence-filling extraordinaire, had been talking less and less until it tapered off to nothing. Bentley hadn’t heard him say a word since Friday morning in the cave. 

I hate this. I can't handle it anymore, Babybird.

Those were the last words Dick Grayson said before he fell into a state Steph softly described as nonverbal.

She said it was common, especially with Dick, to go silent when he was overwhelmed. It had happened  on several occasions before — occasions she seemed to be purposefully vague about. And now it was happening to him again. The very last glimmer of hope in the Manor died when Dick Grayson became nothing more than blank stares and sign language.

Jason, on Saturday morning, ramped his screaming and thrashing back up to a one hundred, and even busted one of the leather straps on his arms. He kept rotating through the same various shouts: I’ll kill you. Get away from me. B. Batman. Bruce. Dad. I don’t want to die. Repeat. 

Bentley had spent most of the time when Jason wasn’t screaming struggling through the pages of Pride and Prejudice, hoping that maybe some distant part of his mind could hear the familiar words. Bentley couldn’t imagine writhing under the weight of his own mind, being stuck in his head, unable to escape like a Robin in a cage. Like Jason was. 

Damian still hadn’t moved an inch, besides his hands that would twitch and curl every now and then. Given what little Bentley knew about his past (and the abundance of other things he could’ve been seeing), he assumed twitching was a pretty minimal response. Or maybe the only response Damian allowed himself to have.

Bentley hadn’t heard much about the League of Assassins, but Damian had mentioned before that failure brought punishment. And it hurt Bentley’s heart just a little to see that his endless training to have no reaction to physical or mental pain seemed to stem all the way into his unconsciousness.

On Saturday night, Bentley noticed the palm of Damian’s right hand bleeding from the force of his fingernails against his skin. His hands were moving in a familiar manner that Bentley only recognized then — that Damian was clutching onto a sword that didn’t exist. At that time, Bentley was the only one in the cave, and his first instinct to make Damian stop hurting himself was to put his own hand in the way.

Now, he had three Wonder Woman bandaids on the back of his hand where Damian’s nails had dug in.

Tim had become a level of bedridden Bentley didn’t even know existed — a type of bedridden where he became less Tim and more bed. He was only able to keep himself conscious for small spurts at a time, usually to take medicine or throw up or drink what little water Bruce could get into him. But, on the bright side, his fever had dropped to a hundred and two. Small mercies.

Bentley was at least glad he wasn’t being tormented by the Secret Keeper. But even then, he had only been working so hard because of the people she killed, which, in turn, made it all her fault, actually.

The Wayne family was in a state of disarray Bentley didn’t even know was possible. Patrol had been dropped in favor of caring for the ones in the medbay. School was nothing but a fleeting memory — it hadn’t been mentioned since Tuesday. Everyone was in the Manor but it felt like no one at all, like they were all trapped in some dark tunnel they would never see the end of. Like John Whittaker’s wish that the Wayne Dynasty would crumble was coming to fruition right before their eyes.

Who gave the Secret Keeper the right to do that to them? Who gave her the authority to destroy Bentley’s family from the inside out? And for what? For fun? Entertainment?

Bentley was pissed about it.

Wholeheartedly, entirely, absolutely pissed.

It was after dinner on Sunday night, and he was cooped up in the den with Dick, Duke, Steph, and Cass, watching some random Disney movie on a low volume. No one was really watching. Their eyes may have been on the screen, but he could practically see their minds wandering behind them. He didn’t blame them, his mind was wandering, too. Mostly concerning the fact that he felt like he wanted to, like, burn down a house or something.

Bentley had never been one for anger before. He was always too afraid of his father to be mad, too scared, too upset. He never had anything to fight for like he did now — like the Wayne’s. He never had anything to protect, nothing to be so utterly hell-bent on keeping in one piece. He’d been feeling it for a while, that little inkling that made him want to commit arson every time something happened to one of them. 

Instead of burning down someone’s house, he wanted to end the Secret Keeper.

Which was exactly why, for the first time in five days, he texted Asten and Nico back.

The group-chat had basically imploded on itself in Bentley’s absence. He had well over two-hundred texts in that group alone, not counting the questioning from both Asten and Nico individually. Was he sick? Was he alive? Why weren’t Damian or Duke at school? Had he been murdered? Was he missing? Should they call the cops?

I’m ready to go to the cabin was the vague and pretty random text they got from Bentley at nine on Sunday night.

Asten was quick to reply: JESUS dude. I thought you were DEAD dead. 

OMG YOURE ALIVE!!!!! was the text he got from Nico.

Secret Keeper again, he sent. And then, in a separate message: I’m ready to destroy her now.

Hell yeah! Was Asten’s next text. I’m so down. Can you both get out of your houses tonight? Preferably without anyone noticing? And stay out of them for a few days?

Stay out of the house for a few days? He hadn’t really thought about that, though he guessed it made sense — a secret plan to take out a supervillain was likely to take a while. But the Wayne’s couldn’t have a clue what was going on; they’d end it. Coming and going from the Manor would be too risky. So… that meant Bentley would probably have to do what he’d failed so miserably at the first time.

Run away. Again.

Which he pretended he didn’t feel bad about. As soon as he was out of the Manor, he’d have to commit — no turning back, no running home until the Secret Keeper was down. It was the only way to do it without anyone finding out. 

But, if he went missing now… the Wayne’s would think the Secret Keeper got him, wouldn’t they?

Bentley glanced down at his legs. Dick’s head was laying there, and though his breathing was soft and his eyes were closed, Bentley knew he wasn’t asleep. The child had been playing with his hair for a while now — it seemed to be the only thing that could take the tension out of his older brother’s shoulders anymore.

Was destroying the Secret Keeper really worth the pain it might cause them? Thinking that she got him? That he might be dead? Was it worth the people that cared about him most thinking that he was killed?

What if he actually didn’t come home? 

He ended up having to shove that train of thought deep down into his Puppeteer door and locked it away. If he thought about it too much, he’d feel guilty, and wouldn’t be able to go on with the plan like he said he would.

I can make it happen, he sent to the group, careful to keep one hand on Dick’s head so he didn’t get suspicious.

My parents are going to die, Nico said.

Asten replied: We can’t bring our phones — they can be tracked. You’ll have to delete this text thread before you leave. Nico, bring your camera.

Oh, God. They were really doing this, weren’t they? Bentley glanced up at the other Wayne’s in the den, faces illuminated by the firelight, like they could read his mind. None of them seemed to be.

Every police officer in Gotham is going to look for us, my parents will make sure of that, Nico texted. Bentley cringed at the thought. At least most of his Vigilante family wouldn’t be patrolling, right?

Bentley typed a quick: You don’t have to come.

I'm coming, was Nico’s reply.

Asten finalized: We’ll meet at Nico’s house at midnight. No phones. Bring what you think you’ll need, I’ll handle the rest. Don’t say a word. Vamos matar essa vadia.

Bentley glanced around him, at Steph on his right and Dick on his lap, staring blankly at the television. This was going to be worth it. It had to.

“Dick?” He whispered, leaning forward the slightest bit, just far enough to catch the older boy’s eyes when they flicked open. He didn’t speak, but he lifted his hands subtly, moving them in carefully trained motions.

Yes?

Bentley breathed in and out. “I’m going to go back downstairs,” He whispered. “I just didn’t want to shove you around if you were sleeping.”

Dick replied with a nod, sitting up just far enough for Bentley to maneuver out from under him. The child shuffled off the couch and stood, glancing back at Dick Grayson’s ocean-but-more-like-a-lake blue eyes.

There was… there might’ve been… an actual chance he would never come home.

He moved forward, gently wrapping his arms around Dick’s neck. “I love you.”

Dick hugged him back tight, maybe not as enthusiastically as normal, but with just as much love.

Bentley had to keep himself moving, or he’d think about the possibility of death and psyche himself out. So he reluctantly peeled himself away from Dick and fought the urge to give everybody hugs. (He knew that would be too suspicious, but that didn’t mean he didn’t want to.)

With a breath in, he left the den and floated down to the cave.

Bruce and Alfred were both down there. The latter was still working at the various testing machines, while the former was between Tim and Jason’s hospital beds, still looking torn about what spot in the room he took. There was an empty chair between Jason and Damian’s beds that Bentley had seen Bruce in not too long ago. Jason wasn’t screaming, but he was wiggling around quite a bit. The other two were still.

The Bat knew he was in the cave before Bentley even knew he knew. 

“Bentley,” Bruce greeted lowly, turning from the hospital beds toward the entrance of the cave, where the child was just standing. Nowadays, his gray eyes seemed to just get more dull. “Are you guys done watching movies?”

Bentley shrugged, padding into the medbay, fiddling with the band-aids on his hand from where Damian’s grip had made him bleed. Tim’s Wonder Woman pajamas had been replaced with some old sailboat ones of Jason’s. “Just coming to check on them.”

Bruce’s eyes drifted back to the trio of beds, and he sighed softly. “No changes.”

Bentley glanced at each of them, then back at Bruce, who leaned forward and pinched the bridge of his nose. Body language that indicated stress, Bentley noted. 

He moved forward slowly, coming to a stop next to Bruce’s chair, glancing at Tim and Jason. “Are you okay?”

The question was aimed at Bruce, who glanced at Bentley at the same time he looked at him.

“Of course,” Was Bruce’s reply, and his hand drifted up, landing on Bentley’s back. 

Bentley shook his head. “You don’t have to be.”

If there was anything Bentley had learned since he moved in with the Wayne’s, it was that he didn’t need to keep everything to himself. That he could cry and stuff like his father never let him. So why, when it came back to the Wayne’s, did they seem to do exactly the opposite? Hold it in until they broke, like Tim, like Damian, like Dick?

Bruce graced him with a vague semblance of a smile that left as quickly as it came. “You’re one smart boy, you know that?”

Bentley said nothing. In all of his (limited) days, he had never ever been called smart. Stupid, dumb, worthless, and everything in between, but never smart.

“And I think…” Bruce’s eyes trailed over to Tim, Damian, and Jason. “That I might be cold.”

Bentley blinked, and then hauled himself into the man’s embrace without question.

Bruce’s arms closed around him, protecting him from probably anything in the entire world, and Bentley sighed lightly. “I think everyone’s kinda cold.”

“I think you’re right,” Bruce replied, glancing between his three unconscious sons.

The family was so cold they might just turn to ice if one more bad thing happened. Like Bentley seemingly going missing.

Was his escape plan really worth it?

—

When he woke up in Bruce’s arms, it was silent.

He didn’t remember falling asleep there, but it wasn’t a surprise, really. He had quite a bad habit of falling asleep when people held him.

Nothing was different from when he fell asleep — the trio was still unconscious, Alfred was still testing, and Bruce was still dull and cold. The only thing that looked the slightest bit different was the glow from the Batcomputer that hadn’t been on before. Barbara must’ve come to work on cases for a while, though she wasn’t there now.

“Hey, bud,” Bruce whispered, and Bentley felt his hand moving subtly on the back of his head. “You can sleep — I’ve got you.”

For a moment, Bentley almost just obeyed. It was tempting. But he knew that if he didn’t make himself get up and go, he wouldn’t, and he couldn’t leave Asten and Nico hanging.

So, instead, he fished his phone out of his pants pocket and checked the time. 11:14pm. Asten wanted them to meet at midnight.

Bentley rubbed his eyes and glanced up at Bruce, blinking a few times, then wiggling out of his arms. “I’ll be right back. I’m gonna go check on Dick.”

Bruce rubbed his back as he stood. “Okay. Text me if you decide not to come back down.”

Bentley’s words seemed to taste funny when he lied, and the sour on his tongue only got worse when Bruce replied with no suspicion. With trust — he believed him.

The child pushed himself across the Batcave, fighting away the questions of was it worth it the whole way. 

Well, until he stopped at the Batcomputer.

The screen was on with two pictures on it — pictures of metahuman villains from recent patrols. The Secret Keeper was one of them, staring into Bentley’s soul with her amber eyes and stitched grin. It simply said The Secret Keeper below her picture.

There was a picture of another girl with black hair and what looked to be purple eyes next to her. Beneath her photo it said The Void. Bentley remembered watching the patrol where they fought her a few weeks ago, before everything got really bad. She could make portals and send whatever she wanted wherever she wanted. (Then came the debacle of getting Duke home from Austrailia — Bentley would never forget that.)

He quietly wondered why they were both up on the screen. 

And then the screen went off.

Bentley whipped around, meeting the tired green eyes of Barbara rolling out from another room in the cave. “I think you’ve seen quite enough of her, squirt.”

He said nothing, but glanced back at the blank screen. “Sorry.”

Barbara rolled past him in her wheelchair. “No sweat.”

Bentley continued upstairs without another word, carrying himself, not to the den where he told Bruce he was going, but up to his room instead. Asten said for him to bring what he thought he’d need. What did he need for chasing down a supervillain?

Well, first things first — he needed to not be wearing pajamas. He closed and locked his door up tightly, changing into jeans, a hoodie, and a jacket. His phone said it was in the fifties outside, which definitely wouldn’t be super fun, but would probably be bearable.  

Asten’s rule was that he had to delete the text thread and leave his phone behind. So he did so, and left his phone on his bed, out in the open. 

He didn’t really need anything, did he? There wasn’t anything for him to bring — all he had were clothes and school supplies and toys. Maybe some of Batman’s gadgets would be useful, but stealing from the cave when he was trying to be incognito was a hard pass.

Really, all that was left would be to make it out of the Manor.

He couldn’t go out the window again. He’d have to make a new shoelace rope, and he had to make the Wayne’s think he was missing, not that he’d run away. So, there was only one obvious choice left. With everyone distracted and in varying states of consciousness, not being their typical superhero detective selves, Bentley would go out the front door.

It wasn’t the best for someone who was trying to sneak out undetected, but it would have to do. Alfred and Bruce were in the cave with Jason, Tim, and Damian, and the rest were in the den distracted by a movie. If he could be deathly quiet, he could do it.

So, with that settled, Bentley opened his bedroom door again. The hallway felt stuffier this time. Was risking his life worth it?

Breaking the Secret Keeper’s hold on his family? Stopping the downward spiral?

Yes. It was worth it.

That was the thought process that kept Bentley padding down the hall in his gross red tennis shoes from his father. He’d been sure to thoroughly hide his pajamas in hopes they would think he was really missing. He’d taken the most inconspicuous clothes from his wardrobe, in case they checked it for empty spaces. It ended up being an old black jacket of Dick’s and a blue hoodie that he was pretty sure had been Tim’s.

It was worth it for them.

He tip-toed down the staircase silently, skipping the creaky sixth and twelfth steps on purpose, before he came to rest on the floor of the entryway.

He could hear the movie playing in the den, but everything else was still. Silent.

Nico’s house was pretty much a straight shot from the Manor — they saw it every day on the way to and from school. If he went straight, he’d make it.

He inched himself toward the front door. The giant wooden mass was more than a little daunting right now, like it would break and tell everyone what he was planning.

It was worth it to save them.

His hand was suddenly on the lock, twisting it until it clicked.

He had to save his family.

He twisted the door handle until the cool August breeze flooded inside, chilling him to the bone.

Bentley closed the door, and he ran. Just like he did the first time. Through the courtyard, down the driveway, shoving himself through the bars of the main gate just like he did last year.

Bentley didn’t know it then, but the moment he stepped foot outside of Wayne Manor marked the beginning of what would become the most traumatic few days of his entire life.

—

dedicated to @sassenashsworld 💚

—

tag list! (If you want me to remove or add you, ask in comments!)

@fleur-alise @sarcopterygiian @cademygod @skylathescholar @gayboss-too-close-to-the-sun

[maccreadysbaby]

A Hundred Ways to Become a Wayne

batfamily + oc insert

tw: angst

wanna read more? here’s the table of contents!

want to read the first fic in the hundred days series so you understand what’s going on here? here it is!

terrible bad plan number 19284728 is brewing (and so is something else)

part thirty-five

❝ ARSONIST ❞

THURSDAY — SEPTEMBER 3 — 7:00AM

ASTEN WAS… REALLY, REALLY, REALLY SICK. Just within four hours of arriving at the Manor, he’d thrown up three fever medicine attempts, gone up to a hundred-and-four temperature, and hadn’t been able to say a coherent sentence the entire time.

Bentley and Nico had taken up residence on a loveseat situated in the corner of the dim guest room, and Nico was curled up across it, dead asleep with his head on Bentley’s lap. Alfred kept checking his temperature frequently with a forehead scanning thermometer. The screen always turned green, which meant good. Asten’s always turned red.

Surprisingly enough, Jason had taken it upon himself to stay in the bedroom basically the whole time. Bentley wasn’t really sure why — maybe he cared about Asten because they were both from Crime Alley? He didn’t really know, and he wasn’t going to ask and ruin it. He liked having Jason around so much, even if it wasn’t for him. Dick and Bruce kept going in and out to fetch things they needed and to give Nico’s parents updates. (Asten’s uncle, Sam, didn’t seem to care much about updates. He never picked up Dick’s calls.)

It had taken a while for Nico to stop crying. Everything seemed to be taking more of a toll on him than Bentley realized. Especially distancing himself from his parents; that was the worst part. With the whole adoption surprise and now the superpowers, he wouldn’t even begin to let himself near them. And for a kid who had never really been away from them to start with, it was pretty hard. Sleeping was the most peaceful Bentley had seen him in a while, so he stayed dutifully still as to not disturb his slumber.

The guest room had been silent for a while, apart from Alfred checking Asten and Nico’s temperatures every now and then. Currently, he was out of the room, searching with Bruce for a medicine Asten might be able to stomach better, and Jason went with them to get more liquid for the drip, leaving Nico and Bentley the only two in the room.

It seemed like absolutely everything that could go wrong, was going wrong. And Bentley was always to blame.

“Remember Titus?”

Bentley flinched with a gasp when Nico spoke, very nearly whacking him in the face. He glanced down, and Nico was looking up at him, blue eyes glazed over a dull. “I didn’t know you were awake.”

Nico sat up with a small, forced snicker that didn’t really reach his eyes. He ran a hand through his fluffy blonde hair and sighed, rubbing his face. “Sorry. Apparently I’m so tired that sleeping is hard.”

“I’m sorry,” Bentley mumbled, glancing over at Asten. “And yeah. I remember Titus.”

Nico pulled his knees up on the maroon loveseat, rubbing at his eyes with his hands. “He ran… or, teleported away after Asten told him about his parents. Never showed back up. Didn’t this happen to him before he got superpowers? The sickness?”

“Uh…” Bentley glanced over at Nico, who was waiting expectantly for an answer to the question he already knew the answer to, and then back over at Asten’s limp form. Only his head was visible beneath the beige quilt. “I guess so…”

“It’s all there. Fever, throwing up, delirium, vertigo, fatigue, sweating, loss of consciousness. The only thing Dr. Keene talked about that we haven’t seen from him was burning pain,” Nico explained in a whisper, fiddling with his pajama pants. (Bentley’s sailboat pajamas, actually. They had him change after he admitted that Asten had indeed thrown up on him.) 

Bentley blinked a few times. “But Titus was sick as soon as he came out of the synchronizer. It’s been over two weeks since we were there.”

Nico shrugged, resting his head on his knees. “I dunno. It was just something I thought about.”

“Didn’t Titus’s sickness just go away after five days?” Bentley questioned, glancing over at him, and Nico replied with a simple nod. 

“It’s starting day six for Asten.”

Bentley turned back toward their sick friend. He watched in silence as Asten turned his head with a groan, making the cool washcloth Dick put there flop off onto the mattress.

With a soft exhale, Bentley stood, stretching and making his way to the edge of the bed. Asten still looked terrible — his face was fever flushed and he was sweating like no one Bentley had ever seen. That and the wet washcloth made his black and blue hair soggy and stick to his face. His lips were pale and Bentley didn’t think he’d seen his eyes open once since he’d arrived. It reminded him of when Tim was sick — scary.

With a pang of pity that moved through his veins, he dipped the washcloth in a bowl of cold water, squeezed it out, and put it back on Asten’s forehead.

An extremely dramatic groan was the first real reaction they got out of Asten all day. He didn’t say any words, but turned his head to the side to make the washcloth fall off again.

“I know it's cold,” Bentley started, grabbing the cloth and putting it back, keeping his hand over it so it wouldn’t move even if Asten did. “But it’s helping you.”

Asten turned his head from side to side trying to get it off, and Bentley apologetically held it there. Nico drifted up next to him with a quiet sigh.

“I wish he would be better already,” He muttered, huffing and crossing his arms. “He’s going to hate me.”

Bentley momentarily glanced at him, catching the calculating way he was looking at Asten. “Why would you say that?”

Nico shrugged, his dull blue eyes bouncing around the room. “On the third day, when his fever was really bad, I said we should probably call you or my parents or an ambulance or something, but he wouldn’t let me. He said he didn’t want any help. And now I brought him here.”

“You… did the right thing,” Bentley replied, looking back at Asten, who was still moving his head side to side. “The best thing for him.”

Nico nodded in silence. 

Asten groaned unintelligibly, and one of his hands came up from under the quilt and pushed weakly at Bentley’s wrist. 

“I know it’s cold,” The redhead repeated. Asten began to squirm slightly on the bed, his eyebrows pinching together in discomfort.

“G’off,” He halfway grumbled. Nico shifted by Bentley’s when an actual word came out of Asten’s mouth for the first time in a whole twenty-four hours.

“Not until your fever breaks,” Bentley replied, holding the cloth firmly in place. “I’m sorry.”

Asten didn’t like that.

“G’off!” He begged in his not-awake-but-not-unconscious limbo, and he pinched his face together in a way that Bentley knew all too well — that he was about to start crying. “Please… please…”

Bentley sighed lightly. “Okay. Just for a minute,” And then he lifted the cloth off of Asten’s forehead again. The older boy’s features softened, and he fell peaceful.

There was shuffling by his side, and before Bentley could turn to see what was happening, Nico scanned Asten’s forehead with their thermometer. Bentley counted to ten and then put the cloth back, to which Asten groaned dramatically again. Only a few seconds later, Nico moved Bentley’s hand and scanned Asten’s head again. And then again.

“What are you doing?” Bentley questioned, glancing over at him. Nico was staring at the glowing red thermometer screen like it had a picture of a unicorn on it, his blue eyes blown dinner-plate wide.

“He should be dead,” Was Nico’s muted mumble.

Bentley furrowed his brow and stepped closer to Nico, peering down at the thermometer.

The screen was bright red, displaying a large  hundred-and-eighteen-point-four.

Bentley blinked, and then rubbed his eyes. Bruce had talked about Tim’s hundred-and-four being bad…

“Do it again,” He ordered. Nico reached forward and repeated the process, swiping the thermometer across Asten’s forehead. A hundred-and-eighteen-point-seven.

“This thing has to be broken,” Nico suggested, lifting the thermometer up and scanning Bentley’s forehead with it. It came back green — ninety-eight-point-four. He reached over and did Asten’s again.

A hundred-and-nineteen-point-six.

“You better put that cloth back on him. This is insane. Impossible, really. He should literally be burning alive inside his own body. Like, vegetable territory,” Nico muttered, scanning his own forehead with the device. Ninety-eight-point-seven.

“He can hear you,” Bentley muttered, dipping the cloth in the water bowl again.

“He shouldn’t be hearing anything! He should be dead!”

Bentley said nothing, wringing out the cloth. Nico checked Asten’s temperature one last time. A hundred-and-twenty-point-one.

“It’s literally getting higher by the second!” 

Bentley pressed the cloth back on Asten’s forehead, to which he protested by screwing his face up and squirming around on the bed some more.

“The highest internal temperature a person has ever survived is a hundred-and-fifteen-point-seven!” Nico exclaimed, tossing the thermometer on the table and staring at Asten with a strange look on his face. Bentley glanced over at him without a word. “What? I looked it up when Asten started getting sick.”

Bentley said nothing, but continued to hold the cloth down on Asten’s forehead. He could feel the heat radiating from him through the cloth. If a hundred-and-four was bad, how was Asten still alive at a hundred-and-twenty?

Asten groaned dramatically again, pushing at Bentley’s wrist with more force now. He grumbled, “Get it off,” coherently, like he was actually starting to wake up.

“I know you don’t-“

“Get it off!”

“But you-“

“Get it off!” Asten’s eyes snapped open that time, but they weren’t green anymore. They were…

They were…

Glowing orange.

Bentley and Nico both jumped backwards, and the cloth slid from Bentley’s fingers and splatted on the floor next to his feet. Asten blinked a few times and looked around the room, a bit disoriented, his orange irises bouncing here and there. 

“Hey,” Bentley greeted nervously, sending a quick glance to Nico. Asten looked over at them, eyes flicking between the pair incredulously. “It’s okay, you’re at my place.”

Asten said nothing, but kept blinking like he wasn’t sure what was going on. Bentley bent down and picked up the washcloth from the floor, dipping it back in the water bowl and wringing it out. “And your fever is really really really high, so I need to put this back on you.”

Asten blinked, the glowing in his eyes unrelenting, the orange pulsing and moving like flames. “But I feel fine.”

“But you-“ Bentley started, but Nico elbowed him lightly. Their eyes met before Nico whispered: “He’s delirious. He was saying the same thing the other day, but he couldn’t even tell me his own name.”

Don’t argue with someone who is delirious, Bentley knew that much from helping with Tim. He nodded to himself and then glanced back over at Asten, who was now sitting up straight, looking around like he’d never seen and bedroom in his life. 

“That’s great. I’m glad you’re feeling better, but your fever is still really really high. The cool cloth is good for you,” He reasoned, wringing it out again and folding it in half to fit on his forehead.

“No it’s not,” Asten argued, shifting away from Bentley on the bed. “It hurts.”

“It’s just cold, buddy. Lay back down,” Bentley tried, holding the cloth up. Asten pushed himself farther away until he was on the far edge of the bed, glaring at the cloth like it had assaulted him. 

“No! Stop it! Get it away! It burns!”

“Shh, shh, stop yelling,” Bentley muttered, glancing at the door in a spurt of panic. If someone heard them, they were screwed. “It's okay, Asten. It’s just a little cool.”

“No it’s not, it burns!”

The washcloth in Bentley’s hand burst into flames with a loud whoosh when Asten said it burns. The redhead cried out in terror, dropping it on the floor with another strange splat.

“Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God!” Nico shouted, spinning around in a circle for reasons unbeknownst to Bentley. “Put it out! Put it out!”

Bentley, in a blind panic, grabbed the water bowl from the nightstand and dumped it all over the cloth (and the floor.) The fire went out with a low sizzle.

No one spoke for a solid five seconds. Bentley looked at Nico, who glanced at him with his blue eyes blown wide, a terrified but awestruck look on his face. Then he looked back at Asten, whose eyes were slowly turning from orange back to green.

Had he just…

Set that on fire?

With his mind?

With a grimace of discomfort, Asten laid back down in the bed, satisfied that the cloth would no longer be attacking him. 

“Asten, do you-“

Before Bentley could finish speaking, Asten’s eyes rolled backwards into his head, and he fell unresponsive again.

“Oh my God! He is a metahuman,” Nico mumbled, glancing around the room warily. “We… we should clean this up before your family gets back. Like, now.”

“If they didn’t already hear you screaming,” Bentley muttered, grabbing the singed and blackened cloth out off of the floor. He sent a quick glance to Asten, who was unmoving.

Nico hurried over to the bathroom and opened the sink cabinets. “I thought it was crazy that I had superpowers. And now he does too?!”

Bentley said nothing, but instead, grabbed the empty water bowl and carried it into the bathroom to refill. He tossed the old rag in the trash and covered it with some toilet paper.

“You know, if he has fire based powers, maybe the cold really does hurt,” Nico suggested, grabbing a towel from the cabinet and heading back into the bedroom to mop up the floor as Bentley filled the bowl in the sink. 

“Maybe,” Bentley replied. Everything comes with a downside, doesn’t it? Everything good?

Bentley brought the full bowl back into the room and put it on the nightstand. Nico handed him a new washcloth, and he dipped it in the water just in time for the bedroom door to swing open.

Jason was wearing a blue hoodie and gray sweatpants now, his hair slightly messy with the white part hanging down toward his eyes. He was carrying a few fluid bags in his hands for Asten’s IV. He paused abruptly after he closed the door, glancing between the three children (one unconscious and two rooted to their spots.) for a few seconds with his greenish-blue eyes narrowed. “What’re you up to?”

Bentley blinked, and with a cringe and a quick glance to a terrified Nico, replied: “Nothing, he just… woke up for a second. He… said a real word, too. A few.”

Jason, after a moment of silence and a few way too detective-ish glances, nodded in approval, making his way to the drip stand and unscrewing the old bag from the IV tubes. “That’s good. Will you hand me the thermometer?”

With a grimace, Bentley grabbed it from the bedside table and handed it over.

He and Nico watched in quiet terror as Jason finished changing out the IV bag and scanned Asten’s forehead with the thermometer. The screen turned red, and he looked at it inquisitively, then set it down on the bed with a sigh. “Looks like the fever might be going down, too.”

Bentley blinked once. Twice. Glanced over at Nico, who looked completely bamboozled but was trying not to. There was no way… what?

“What was the temperature?” Bentley questioned, dipping the washcloth back in the water bowl as a way to look like he wasn’t excruciatingly confused.

“A hundred-and-three-point-nine,” Jason replied. Bentley nodded slightly and wringed out the cloth, folding it and placing it gently on Asten’s forehead. He scrunched his face up, but didn’t wake.

And now the question was: had his temperature actually gone down that far that fast, or was Jason lying so he didn’t freak them out?

“Hey, Bentley,”

Bentley and Nico glanced over at the door that was sitting only slightly ajar, and Bentley shifted awkwardly at the voice that had come through it. Damian hadn’t spoken to him in weeks, why would he be calling for him now?

“Yeah?” He questioned.

He waited for Damian to open the door, but he never did. Jason didn’t say anything about it — probably because the assassin actually wanting to talk to somebody was a sign that he was finished hibernating.

“I’ll be right back,” Bentley said to Nico, who nodded.

Bentley moved from Asten’s bedside to the door and swung it open, glancing out into the hallway. It was completely empty, but Damian’s bedroom door was cracked open. No one else’s was.

“Damian?”

“Bentley,”

His voice was echoing from down the stairs, the foyer. Bentley gently swung the guest room door closed behind him and made for the stairs, thumping down them softly. He couldn’t see anybody at the bottom.

“Damian?”

“Bentley,”

When he reached the bottom of the stairs and could see the entire foyer, there was no one in it. The pale sunrise was illuminating outside the windows, making the whole house glow dimly, but there was no Damian anywhere.

“Bentley,”

The redhead turned on a dime, glancing down the hallway that led to the library and den. That’s where the voice was coming from.

His heartbeat was picking up. Why was his heartbeat picking up? Why was he sort of freaked out? “Damian? Are… you okay?”

“In the den,”

Bentley hesitantly made his way down the hall. He checked each room on the way — the office, the library — and they all came up empty, just like the family had left them. When he finally turned into the den, Damian was standing in the middle of the room in a green hoodie and black pants, looking completely and utterly normal. The room was normal, too — messy from movie marathons with an ever-burning fireplace that gave the whole thing a warm glow. Not a pillow was out of place, everything was just how it was the last time Bentley saw it.

He sighed in relief at the sight of Damian, stepping inside and glancing around. His fear quieted, replaced by something like, maybe, happiness? Shock that Damian was actually talking to him? “What is it?”

Damian looked down at his own socked feet for a few moments, fiddling with his hands inside his hoodie pocket. He looked alright. Good, even. “I just wanted to make sure you are aware… that… I do apologize for my previous behavior towards you.”

Bentley blinked, his eyes wandering around the den awkwardly. Right; Damian didn’t like apologizing in front of people, just like when they were in the car. “Uh… it's…”

“I… have to get used to how words affect you. You are different from my brothers. Richard and Drake and Todd — they can threaten one another and say the most crude things all day and still be friends at dinner. I… am still not sure how to effectively communicate with you,” Damian admitted, glancing down at the carpeted floor. “I am sorry for all those things I said. I did not mean them.”

Bentley breathed in and out, blinking. Damian wasn’t really one to go changing his mind, so maybe he actually hadn’t meant it in the first place? But it had sounded so sincere…

Bentley inhaled, muttering softly: “Do you really think everything would be better if I was gone?”

“No,” Damian sighed, shaking his head. Bentley glanced down at his own socks. Why did he feel like he was about to cry?

He heard Damian shift. “I think everything would be better if you were dead.”

Bentley glanced back up at him, and he had a strange, twisted smirk on his face that looked forced, mangled, even. So grotesque that it reminded him momentarily of the joker. Damian’s eyes weren’t blue — they were amber. 

Bentley inhaled sharply. “You’re not Damian.”

He took a few steps back. The fake Damian cackled strangely, and in a blink, it wasn’t Damian anymore — it was The Secret Keeper, standing in the den, in the Manor, right in front of him. Her crooked stitched smile was bleeding, and the tips of her platinum hair were stained crimson. Bentley shouted in fear and stumbled backwards, fell over his own two feet, and hit the floor of the den with a dull thud.

“I can make you see what I want you to see!” The Secret Keeper shouted in a somewhat manic manner, spinning around, her stringy hair whacking her in the face. The den around them melted away into a stretch of the white hallways from Dr. Keene’s lab, sterile and bright and terrifying. Davis was laying at the end of the hall, straight in front of Bentley, covered in something scarily crimson. 

His heart jumped. “Davis?!”

“I can make you hear what I want you to hear!”

“Bentley!” Someone screamed — a girl. Bentley turned around on the cold white tile and, at the opposite end of the hall from Davis, stood a small girl with long red hair. She was wearing pink overalls, holding a purple teddy bear. She was crying. “Bentley, help! He’s coming!”

“Vivienne?” He whispered. How did he know her name?

The Secret Keeper laughed, but he couldn’t see her. “I can reach into every future in every universe and show it to you. Your past, present, and future are mine!” 

Bentley’s father suddenly appeared behind the redhead girl, running at her and scooping her up from behind. Vivienne screamed, dropping the bear and kicking and flailing as he carried her away.

“No! No, father, I don’t want to go to the closet! No! Please! Bentley, help!”

Was Vivienne Bentley’s… sister?

The white hallways faded and melted into a white room of nothing. Bentley had been there before.

“I can make your family hear or see anything I want. Why else would they ignore Nico’s windstorm? The screaming? Because they didn’t hear it,” The Secret Keeper stepped out in front of Bentley from nowhere, smiling twistedly at him, her eyes wide and wild. “Their minds are mine to guide. I’m building the foundations of a future where we’re guaranteed to win. Your family won’t know what happened to you until it’s too late, and if you try to tell them?”

She smiled at him with serious, dead eyes. “I’ll kill you. And all of them. And everyone.”

Bentley breathed in a shaky breath. “Please-“

“I can see everything that’s going to happen tomorrow, the next day, the next day. And if I play my cards right, if I keep the Wayne’s in the dark, Batman and his whole team will be gone in a few short weeks. Days,” She spun around again like she was talking to herself, tugging at her hair like she was going kind of crazy. “I can see everything that’s coming and it’s all mine!”

Bentley’s heart was pounding out of his chest, and he breathed in shakily. “Charlie-“

“I’m not Charlie!” The Secret Keeper screamed, and suddenly, she had Bentley by the throat. She slammed him into a wall he couldn’t see, his toes barely brushing the ground. She was only inches from his face. “I’m not Charlie!”

Bentley gasped for air, tugging at her hand with both of his. Why was she so strong? “You… were.”

The Secret Keeper stared at him blankly for a solid ten seconds, silent, squeezing his throat. Her amber eyes went unblinking for so long they began to water. She was shaking. “Help me.”

Bentley tugged and scratched at her hand. “Let… go,” He gasped, struggling against her strength. “Pl…ease.”

“Help me,” She whispered, but it sounded like her voice was doubled. Bentley’s eyes began to blur from the lack of air. Someone popped out from behind The Secret Keeper — someone purple. Bentley saw that their hands were encased in metal capsules, chained to the ground by huge, thick chains. He blinked twice, and the image cleared. 

It was Charlie. The real Charlie, with blonde hair, with blue eyes, in the royal purple dress she wore the day she was turned into the Secret Keeper. She had a huge metal muzzle on her head that kept her mouth locked away like a dog. Her eyes were bloodshot, her face red from crying.

“Save me,”

In a literal flash of yellow lightning, Nico blipped into Bentley’s vision and slammed a metal fire poker into the Secret Keeper’s head like he was hitting a home run. The white room immediately turned back into the den, the voices faded, and Bentley hit the carpeted floor with a thump. 

He fell into a coughing fit, his hand floating up to his throat. He was shaking, he could feel it — and his heart was pounding out of his chest.

Nico dropped the blood-splattered fire poker with a clang. The Secret Keeper wasn’t there anymore. Had she vanished into thin air?

“Are you okay?” Nico questioned, grabbing Bentley’s arms and tugging him out of the floor. He was breathing really fast, too, and he touched various places on Bentley’s shoulders and head. “Did she hurt you? Is your throat okay? Where did she go? Did I kill her?!”

Bentley stayed silent, focusing on getting air in and out of his body. His throat was going to bruise — how would he hide that?

Nico pulled Bentley into him, hugging him tightly. “Where did she go?”

“I dunno,” Bentley mumbled.

Nico sighed. “That was so weird. Charlie, she…”

“You could see Charlie?” Bentley questioned, and he felt Nico nod.

“After you came downstairs, everything turned white and I saw her. Like, really her, before the Synchronizer. She told me that the Secret Keeper was attacking you,”

Bentley sighed, his mind struggling to keep up with everything. “But… what?”

Nico pulled away with a sigh, running a hand through his fluffy hair. “I don’t know. All I know is that I saw her, not the Secret Keeper, and she warned me.”

A moment of silence passed where they just stood there. Was Charlie inside the Secret Keeper, like a passenger along for the ride? Doing everything against her will? Was she trying to get out?

“We have to tell your dad,” Nico finally muttered, shaking his head. “This is insane.”

“No,” Bentley ordered, shaking his head urgently. “We can’t- we can’t tell anybody.”

Nico cringed, furrowing his brows, turning to leave the room. “She’s just trying to scare you into silence. We have to tell them.”

“No!” Bentley grabbed his shoulder and tugged him backwards. “We can’t. She’ll hurt them.” 

“We can’t just keep letting this happen!” Nico exclaimed, locking eyes with him. “She’s harassing you.”

“I’m not going to risk their lives. I’ve seen her kill people with one look,” He replied, exhaling heavily. He drew his hand back and looked down at the floor. “This is all my fault. The least I can do is stop getting other people involved.”

Nico blinked a few times. “Don’t say that.”

“It’s true. Their life was fine before I got here,” Bentley muttered. He sighed and walked over to the couch, plopping down on it and running a hand through his hair. “I should just go back to my dad. This is what the whole war is about anyways.”

Nico said nothing, but made for the couch, sitting down beside Bentley. He could feel Nico’s eyes on him but he didn’t look up from his socks.

“I… I’ve seen… some memories. Of your father,” He said softly. “You can’t go back to that.”

Bentley sniffled. When had his eyes become so watery? “I’d rather go back to that than watch them suffer for me. I survived ten years of it.”

“You can’t do that. They love you here,”

Bentley groaned, dropping his head down into his hands. “This is a disaster. She was right. Everything would be better if I was just dead.”

The den fell eerily silent and still. After a long while of nothingness, Bentley glanced up at Nico, who was staring at him in a mixture of shock and despair, his ocean blue eyes gleaming with crystal clear tears. 

“Please don’t say that,” He whispered, almost inaudibly. A pang of guilt rang through Bentley at the sight of him, and he sighed.

Not a single thing that Bentley ever did went right, did it?

He cleared his throat softly. “Nico, I…”

“Stop. Talking. Just stop for a second,” Nico ordered, looking away and breathing deep, gathering his composure. He looked back at Bentley with glossy eyes. “The Secret Keeper is and has been tormenting you for weeks. Weeks she’s spent on you and the people around you. Ruining them to ruin you. And you’re letting her. You’re letting her ruin you.”

Bentley opened his mouth, but nothing came out.

“You know what I see when I look at that? When I see her trying to keep you in this constant state of terror and anxiety and loneliness?” Nico questioned, a hand floating up to land on Bentley’s shoulder. “She’s scared of you.”

Bentley blinked. “What? No she’s not. She can kill me.”

Nico squeezed his shoulder. “They said in the video diaries we saw in that morgue that the whole goal of this operation is to destroy Batman — Bruce. Your family. Damian, Robin. Dick, Nightwing-”

Bentley’s mouth fell open. “You- I- what?”

“Don’t worry, Asten doesn’t know, just me,” Nico continued with a shrug. “It’s not that hard to figure out. If you look at the number and ages of the main superheroes in Gotham, they all line up with this family. Not to mention that Dick Grayson goes between here and Bludhaven, and so does Nightwing. And the connection between your father and the Secret Keeper and Batman — it just makes sense. Not to mention you look really awkward whenever we mention superheroes at all.”

Bentley exhaled. So, he put the whole family in danger, got himself kidnapped, lied about a billion times, and now his best friend knows Bruce is Batman. “Bruce is going to die.”

“I won’t say anything. Promise. Anyway, here’s what I was getting at-“ Nico moved his hands around in the air. “They could do this entire evil diabolical plan without involving you at all. They could go straight for the throat and take out Bruce and the family for vengeance and revenge and blah blah blah and never spend a second on you, but they’re not. The Secret Keeper is going through hell to keep you on your knees. You know why?”

Bentley blinked.

“Because there’s something in you that can beat them, and they know it,” Nico said. “They’re expending all this energy toward keeping you down when they could be using it on Batman and his crew. You’re not the same kid that bowed at his father’s feet and they know it.”

Bentley looked down. “But-“

“The Secret Keeper can see the future, and the only one she’s completely hellbent on keeping quiet is you.”

Bentley said nothing.

“And maybe you don’t want to tell your family. That’s fine. But I still believe that you can get the upper hand if you take it. You said it yourself, this whole war is about you. So climb out of the hole she’s trying to bury you in and end it,”

Bentley breathed in and out, glancing around the room. He could hear something moving, above them, in the ceiling, like water in the pipes. He could feel it pumping like blood in his veins.

“I might not be the best at using superpowers yet, but I’ll do anything you need me to do. We’re a team, and Asten is part of it too, okay? You’re not alone,”

Bentley swallowed thickly and nodded to himself.

How many ten year olds could say they’d started and stopped a war?

—

dedicated to @sassenashsworld 💚

—

tag list! (If you want me to remove or add you, ask in comments!)

@fleur-alise @sarcopterygiian @flyrobinflyy @skylathescholar @gayboss-too-close-to-the-sun @xiaonothere

[maccreadysbaby]

A Hundred Ways to Become a Wayne

batfamily + oc insert

tw: none

wanna read more? here’s the table of contents!

want to read the first fic in the hundred days series so you understand what’s going on here? here it is!

the name for this chapter in my notes was “bentley hates having feelings but he loves having jason” yes it’s short but it’s setting up for the next more intense ones :) also the title of this chapter is totally foreshadowing

part thirty-two

❝ DROWNING ❞

SUNDAY — AUGUST 23 — 6:51PM

THE WAYNE HOUSEHOLD WAS SO COMPLETELY SCREWED UP THAT BENTLEY ALMOST DIDN’T RECOGNIZE IT ANYMORE.

Over the past five days since he’d arrived back at the Manor, he’d done a whole lot of nothing. Most of his days had been spent in the den with Dick, watching old movies cuddled up on the couch. Dick hadn’t as much as let Bentley out of his sight since he returned home — he’d even been spending the night on the foot of Bentley’s bed. He didn’t mind. Dick still hadn’t talked, but Bentley didn’t mind that, either — because he was home. If he and Dick weren’t in the den, then the could be found in the library, listening to Jason read. They were working their way through The Outsiders again. 

Jason had been having nightmares. Bad ones — ones where Bentley could hear him screaming from down the hall in the middle of the night. Dick was usually the one to get up from Bentley’s bed and hurry to his aid, quickly followed by Bruce. Bentley could only imagine what he was dreaming about — if he had to guess, he knew what it was.

While Jason had been more consistently present than ever, Tim had been practically nonexistent. He was holed up in his bedroom, where Bruce, Alfred, Steph, and Cass had been going in and out of for days. Bentley wasn’t even sure if he’d seen Tim’s face since he got home. He wished he could do something to help — at least before he left he could hold a barf bucket. Now he just sort of felt useless, but he’d rather be useless than annoying. Right?

Damian had more or less resigned to his bedroom, as well. Bruce went in and out often. Bentley could hear Damian talk and had seen him through the doorway on a couple of occasions — he seemed okay, as in, not bedridden. Bentley wasn’t so sure about how okay the rest of him was. Since they were graced with rooms only one wall apart, Bentley had heard him tell Bruce to leave and close him out several times without any more words.

Duke had, very reluctantly, started going back to school, only because his SAT was coming that week. Bentley thought there couldn’t be a worse week for the big test he’d been studying for for months — he was stressed out about his family and the test, now. Bentley hadn’t even considered going back to school. Especially without Nico and Asten.

To top it all off, Bruce was running himself rampant. Bentley knew it. Dick knew it. Alfred knew it. Everybody knew it — the Batman ping-ponging back and forth and back and forth and back and forth all day long. From Dick and Bentley, to Tim, to Damian, to Duke, to Jason, back to Tim, to Bentley and Dick, to try again with Damian, to Cass, to Duke, to Steph, to Tim, to Jason, to knock on Damian’s door, to bring Tim some water, to ask how Bentley was doing, to see if Duke needed help studying — Bentley didn’t think Bruce had slept or even sat down since they’d left the cave.

Patrol was nonexistent, everyone was struggling, and Bentley had only really seen two out of eight Wayne kids in the past five days.

And all of it was happening because of him.

To say he was drowning in guilt was an understatement. It felt more like he was becoming it. Like if someone looked up guilt in a dictionary, his picture would be on the page. It was so bad he couldn’t seem to think, to breathe. Like it was tearing him apart.

Asten and Nico hadn’t texted much since Bentley had returned home — only enough to let him know that Asten had told Titus about his parents' deaths, and that the three of them were staying at Asten’s apartment for now. He was instructed to delete the messages right after; they didn’t want anyone to know they weren’t missing anymore.

Bruce had gone about telling Bentley they were missing, too, a few days after he got home, which he had to fake a reaction to. (Not that his crying was fake, he had plenty to cry about.) All it did was make the list of things that he felt bad about longer.

And to make everything just a pinch worse, Dick had gone back to Bludhaven that very day. So Bentley was holed up in the library with Jason instead.

“I was trembling. A pain was growing in my throat and I wanted to cry, but greasers don't cry in front of strangers. Some of us never cry at all. Like Dally and Two-Bit and Tim Shepard--- they forgot how at an early age. Johnny crippled for life? I'm dreaming, I thought in panic, I'm dreaming,”

Bentley wished he were dreaming just like Ponyboy wished he were dreaming. He wished he would just wake up on the day after last Christmas and live a happy, normal life with the Waynes. No supervillains, no monsters, no trouble, no problems for him to cause. Just life — like it used to be. Life before they knew he was a traitor and just thought he was a kid from the street. 

Bentley was coiled on one end of the long library couch, knees pulled up to his chest and arms wrapped around them, red hair in a mess on his head. Jason was on the other end, hardcover in hand, reading ever so softly.

Bentley breathed in, brushing a hand through his red hair. Everything was wrong.

“Hey, Jason?” His voice was so quiet it broke off at the end, making it sound more like he’d said Jay than Jason. But he didn’t seem to care all that much.

“Yeah?” He saw Jason’s head turn in his peripheral, deep blue eyes coming to rest on the side of Bentley’s head.

Bentley tapped his fingers on his knees. “Do you think Ponyboy’s life ever went back to normal? After Johnny and Dally died?”

Jason looked over at him, letting the book rest on his lap with a deep breath in and out. His eyes drifted away.

“I’m sure it did, kid,”

A moment of silence passed.

“Do you think ours will? After all of this?” Bentley questioned softly, shaking his head. The familiar sting of tears came but he used all of his willpower to force it away.

Jason scanned him quietly, calculatively.

“I… can’t say our lives have ever been very normal, but… yeah. I do,” Jason replied, deep blue eyes dancing across Bentley’s face. “Everything’s gonna be alright, kid.”

Bentley sighed deeply, shrinking further into himself. “Maybe it would be better if Bruce got rid of me.”

“What?” Jason questioned suddenly, closing the book and laying it aside, a faintly alarmed expression creeping across his features. “What’re you talking about, kid?”

“Everything’s gone wrong since I got here. It was all fine before,” Bentley replied with a huff. “The only thing that changed here was me.”

He heard Jason sigh, then shift toward him on the couch. “None of this is your fault, kid.”

If only Jason knew the truth — that it quite literally all was.

Bentley felt something forming in his throat, and he looked away. “It is.”

Jason moved closer to him again. “How are supervillains ransacking Gotham your fault? How is you getting kidnapped your fault?”

Bentley felt a familiar feeling — the intense urge to spill the whole truth, the urge that he always felt before the Wayne’s knew about his dad. But he couldn’t, Asten told him not to. He shouldn’t. Right? He should respect Asten’s wishes. Right? 

“I can’t tell you,” He finally whispered, hiding his face away in his knees. “I can’t tell you...”

He heard Jason huff. “Look, kid, if… if someone threatened you to keep you quiet, they aren’t going to get to you again. Promise.”

Bentley shook his head, pressing his knees into his eye sockets to keep the tears inside. “No one threatened me. I just… I can’t tell you.” But I want to tell you so bad. 

“Bentley-“

“I feel like I’m drowning,” He piped up suddenly, eyes burning spectacularly. “Like I can’t… I can’t move, I can’t think, can’t breathe, can’t hear, can’t see, can’t-“

“Hey, hey,” Jason was suddenly right next to him, and there was a warm hand on his back. “Just breathe, kid. Everything’s going to be okay.”

“I’m so tired of feeling like this all of the time,” Bentley said with a pitiful hiccup that sounded almost wheezy. “I’m always so scared. It feels like I’ll never be happy again.”

There was a moment of silence. 

“I’ve felt like that, too,”

Bentley pulled his head from his lap just far enough to look up at Jason. He was peering at him with his deep blue eyes, white streak hanging down over his forehead, his hand still resting on Bentley’s back.

“Like everything was so bad there was no way it could get better. Like I was just… ruined… and would always be that way,”

Bentley said nothing, but took a shaky breath, forcing the tears to stay inside. Jason breathed in, too.

“When I came back, kid, I was a wreck,” Jason explained quietly. “I was a different person. I felt betrayed, and angry, and hopeless and full of rage, but at the same time I was so… broken. Like I was lost, just someone else trapped in Jason Todd’s body, not the Jason everyone wanted back. So I spiraled. Hard. I hurt people. And I didn’t let anyone help me. I didn’t let myself get help because I felt so… worthless. Empty.”

Bentley said nothing.

“For a long time I kept trying to fix myself. To do it all alone. Because I was scared to let anyone else close enough to see that I was tearing myself apart,” Jason explained quietly, shifting uncomfortably on the couch. “I won’t get into the details, for your sake, kid, but… it took me finding myself only inches from death again to realize that I needed help.”

A moment of silence passed. 

“I want you to know that anyone here will listen to you. I had to teach myself that. I’m still learning it,” Jason sighed, rubbing Bentley’s back a little. “And they’ll be here for you even if you don’t want to talk. You’re not alone.”

Bentley breathed in deep. “I feel alone.”

“You’re not,” Jason said surely. “You’re never really alone, kid. You just have to reach for somebody.”

Who in the world should Bentley reach for when he couldn’t tell them anything? If he told them, they’d hate him. He’d get in so much trouble.

Just like he had done to Bruce all those months ago, after his first nightmare in the Manor, he moved his hand slowly and carefully until he was holding onto the sleeve of Jason’s black hoodie.

Maybe he’d understand that Bentley was reaching for him.

—

Nico and Asten were ‘found’ seven hours later, by returning to Nico’s house.

Bentley hadn’t had to speak to the police — Bruce made sure of that. But Asten and Nico did. Asten said they both played the amnesiac card; which meant they told the cops they couldn’t remember anything. Lied to them. Which Bentley understood, he guessed — he wasn’t much for talking about all of that either. Plus, Asten said Nico cried the whole time and had a well-timed asthma attack, so it made it pretty believable.

Bruce woke Bentley up to tell him they were home. It wasn’t hard to summon a few tired, fake tears of relief, and it wasn’t hard to get Bruce to stay with him for the rest of the night (to ensure he got some sleep, but mostly because Bentley just wanted him to.)

When Dick was gone and Bruce was preoccupied with his other children for the night, a certain white-streaked Wayne found his way into Bentley’s room.

And for a while, with Jason around, Bentley’s life was okay.

—

dedicated to @sassenashsworld 💚

—

tag list! (If you want me to remove or add you, ask in comments!)

@fleur-alise @sarcopterygiian @flyrobinflyy @skylathescholar @gayboss-too-close-to-the-sun @xiaonothere

[maccreadysbaby]

A Hundred Ways to Become a Wayne

batfamily + oc insert

tw: none

wanna read more? here’s the table of contents!

want to read the first fic in the hundred days series so you understand what’s going on here? here it is!

nico is not having a good time right now okay :(

part thirty-four

❝ WINDSTORM ❞

THURSDAY — SEPTEMBER 3 — 3:00AM

ELEVEN DAYS LATER, GOTHAM WAS ODDLY QUIET. Barbara and Alfred had been monitoring the Batcomputer. There had been no metahuman attacks in Batman’s absence, no gangs to bust or mobs to stop — it had all been reduced to petty crime the cops could handle all by themselves, which Bentley found both really strange and really lucky. No one had gone missing. The Secret Keeper hadn’t been seen.

Maybe Davis was able to talk her out of mind control? (Could that happen?) Or maybe he’d… y’know. Used his hands on her? Bentley wasn’t sure, but whatever it was, he was thankful for the momentary peace. (Even though it made him sort of worried about Davis.)

He’d been doing school online for a while now, as had Asten and Nico. None of them were thrilled to go back, especially since Dr. Keene was, according to the classwork and emails Bentley was getting, still working there. Damian had gone back a few days prior.

Nico was getting ahold of his powers; both of them. Sometimes he sent Asten and Bentley videos of him trying stuff out, like the fact that he was so fast he could run up walls and on the ceiling, or that he could do things without people seeing him. The abilities from Dr. Keene, as far as they’d figured out, were air-based. They were harder to get a handle on — he could make the wind blow, even inside (which mostly happened when he was upset) and he’d also taught himself how to make a little tornado in his hand. (Give the asthmatic air powers, haha, how funny, Keene.)

Asten was doing pretty okay, too. Bentley hadn’t heard of anything going on with him — no powers had surfaced, just like none had surfaced for Bentley. It made sense, since Nico was in the Synchronizer the longest. 

Bentley had gotten his sling off, and was regaining movement in his shot shoulder. He was (maybe) becoming less of an emotional trainwreck? He wasn’t sure — it was sometimes hard to tell the difference between feeling better and ignoring them.

Life was largely going back to normal; Tim had been better for about a week, and was eating a little more since they still weren’t patrolling, Bentley thought. They’d gone back to having dinner as a family in the dining room. It had taken some time, but Dick started to talk again; maybe not as much as he typically did, but talking. Jason didn’t stop having nightmares, but he stopped screaming about them so much, which Bentley assumed was good? Alfred got Bruce to sleep. Duke made a 1520 on his SAT. 

The only thing that was still sort of wrong — besides the entire empire Bentley had built out of lies — was Damian.

He still wasn’t really talking to anyone. He’d fallen into a repetitive, precise routine of school and life. Even Dick was getting the cold shoulder, and they were all pretty clueless as to why.

But Bruce was handling it. Everything would be fine — everything was going to go back to normal, just like Bentley hoped. It had to. Right?

And then came the fateful Thursday night.

Bentley was sound asleep, with two people by his side: the heaviest sleeper he’d ever met, and the lightest sleeper he’d ever met. (Aka, Dick Grayson, who could sleep through a hurricane, sprawled on the foot of the mattress, and Jason Todd, who could wake up from a fly sneeze, situated on the left side of Bentley’s bed.) Of course his phone had to start ringing when the clock struck 3:11am.

Jason stirred immediately, as did Bentley, who fumbled tiredly in the pitch black for at least ten seconds before he found the device on his nightstand. He recoiled when the bright screen hit him in the face, the caller ID reading: Nico.

With a few blinks to rid himself of fatigue and right his mind, Bentley put the phone to his ear and whispered: “Hello?”

“Bentley,” Nico’s voice came through. It was quiet, and sounded soft and thick, like maybe he was about to cry? “I need you.”

Bentley pushed himself up on his elbows. “What’s wrong?” Jason was almost immediately sitting up, watching him, listening.

“It’s Asten,” He replied. “He came to my house… what is today? Thursday? He came to my house on Saturday because he wasn’t feeling good, and Sam is out of town. My parents are in Morocco until Monday, but he said it wasn’t too bad, that he just needed someone to keep track of medicine times and stuff.”

Bentley glanced over, making brief and somewhat-disoriented-from-the-dark eye contact with Jason. Dick was still knocked out on the bottom of the bed.

“He’s so sick, Bentley, he can’t even get up. He’s barely eaten anything since he got here. I basically have to fight him to make him take medicine and drink water, and then he just throws it all up,” Nico explained, voice getting thicker as he spoke. “His fever is a hundred and four, and he isn’t making any sense, and I… I’ve been trying so hard, but I…” 

Bentley frowned deeply when Nico sniffled with a soft sob. “I can’t handle it. I don’t want to be alone. Every time he falls asleep I’m afraid he won't wake up.”

Bentley flinched a little when Jason’s hand landed on his arm. He met his blue eyes in the dark, blinking a few times to adjust to the light. “I’ll drive over there to get them. You stay and help Alfred get ready.”

Bentley didn’t have it in him to argue.

“Jasons going to come get you,” Bentley said into the phone, swinging his legs off of his bed. “It’ll be okay — just remember to breathe. Do you want me to stay on the phone?”

Nico sucked in a deep breath, and then let out a shuddery one. “No… it’s okay. I’ll have to get our stuff together.”

Bentley nodded as he flicked his lamp on. Jason was already out of the bed, muttering quietly to an only half-awake Dick. “Jason’ll be there in just a few minutes. Don’t worry.”

“Okay…” Nico muttered. “Okay. Um, actually, I do want you on the phone, just in case?”

“Okay,” Was Bentley’s response.

Now, Nico was famous for being a little bit dramatic every now and then, so Bentley wasn’t really sure what to expect. Not that he assumed Nico was lying, just that he may have been blowing it a little bit out of proportion.

So, after he’d helped prepare a guest room and collected several of the sickness supplies most recently used on Tim, he really hadn’t expected for Asten to look so… so…

Bad.

His heart fell into his toes when Jason, Asten, and Nico came through the front door. Jason was carrying Asten, who looked suddenly very, very small. He was paler than a sheet of paper and coated with a sheen of sweat, shivering despite wearing a large black hoodie and gray sweatpants. His expression was contorted into one of discomfort, eyes shut tightly, but he didn’t seem awake enough to comprehend anything. He seemed… out of it. Like Tim had been.

Nico was also in a state of distress. His blonde hair was a mess, and he was wearing a t-shirt and pajama pants that looked like they might’ve been newly stained. (Bentley didn’t want to know what it was.) The whites of his blue eyes were bloodshot, and his ears, nose, and cheeks were red and splotchy from lots of crying. He had two bags — his own school bag on his left shoulder, and Asten’s on his right. 

Bentley, who had been at the top of the stairs, thudded down to them. “The guest room next to yours is ready.” He said to Jason, who kept moving, heading up the stairs with a quiet thanks. 

When Nico made it within four feet of Bentley, he looked like he was going to cry again.

“Hey…” Bentley tried, grabbing Asten’s bag from Nico’s arms. For a split second, it looked like Nico might’ve tried to hug him, but he stopped himself at the last second and followed Jason up the stairs.

“Thank you,” Was his short reply, his voice thick and muffled just like it had been on the phone. He never looked at Bentley.

“You’re welcome,” The redhead replied, following behind him. “Are you feeling okay?”

“Define okay,” Nico muttered, shaking his head lightly. “Chances are, no. Not at all. But I’m not sick, if that’s what you meant.”

Bentley said nothing.

Bruce and Dick and Alfred were at the ready when they arrived — they had Asten situated in the guest bedroom and were checking things like his blood pressure and temperature before Bentley could even fully comprehend what was going on. He and Nico just put the bags in the bedroom floor and stood on the sidelines. Alfred suggested that Asten needed a drip. Jason ran and got it. Bruce called Nico’s parents. Dick got a cold washcloth and a puke bucket. Alfred kept asking Nico a bunch of detailed questions. Jason called Asten’s uncle. Dick checked Nico’s temperature. (It was fine.)

Everyone was moving and talking and doing things, and it was so chaotic that no one but Bentley really noticed when the wind started to blow inside the Manor.

He glanced over at Nico, who had taken up residence next to the open guest room door. He had his fists clenched really tightly by his sides, so tightly his knuckles were paling. His breathing was a ragged mess, and his eyes — his irises were white.

Oh no.

Bentley, who sent a panicked glance to the family members in the room (thankfully no one was looking at them), wasted no time whisking Nico into the hallway and shutting the door quietly behind them.

“Hey, hey. It’s okay, he’s going to be okay,” Bentley tried. Nico started to pace as soon as they made it out of the room, the breeze following them as they moved. His hands — no, his whole body — seemed to be shaking vigorously, and he was starting to cry again. That type of crying where you can’t really breathe.

“I hate this,” He wept, seeming to purposefully position himself facing away from Bentley, a few paces in front of him, too. “I hate everything. I hate life.”

“Nico-“

“My parents don’t even try to talk to me anymore. Which I did to myself, I know, but it still hurts,” He explained, bringing his arms up to hide his face even though he was facing away. “I haven’t slept in three whole days trying to help Asten, but of course it isn’t working. Why would it? I can't keep up with everything that’s happening to me and I already need a refill on my inhaler which sucks because you’re only supposed to use one a year so now my parents think I need to go to therapy for my anxiety and… and I feel so terrible and sad and alone. I’m so lonely, Bentley. I’m not good at being alone.”

Bentley sighed lightly, empathy bubbling up inside of him. He knew so vividly what Nico was going through that it wasn’t even funny.

“You’re not alone,” Bentley said softly, daring to step closer, echoing what Jason told him in the library. The wind was whipping his hair and tugging at his clothes. “You have me.”

“Don’t get closer,” Nico turned and threw a hand out toward Bentley, hiccuping a spluttering pitifully. His irises were very white, glowing white even beneath all the tears. “I might hurt you. I… I can take the air out of your lungs without even meaning to. I’m dangerous. I can't let you near me.”

Bentley furrowed his brow. “Why not?”

“Because… if you hug me I’m gonna break. And if I break now I might… I might kill you. I might kill all of you. I can’t control this.”

As if on queue, the wind blew and howled down the hall so violently that Bentley literally stumbled from the force, catching himself only by thumping into the wall. (They were going to wake up the whole house.)

“I shouldn’t have come. I have to go,” Nico muttered, wiping at his eyes, then he turned on his heel and made for the stairs.

“Nico!” Bentley tried, following behind him despite the strong wind that was trying to push him the other way. “Please don’t leave. You said you’re not good at being alone, and now you’re going to go be alone?”

“I don’t want to be alone. I have to be alone so I don’t hurt you,” He hiccuped, thudding down the foyer stairs toward the door. Bentley paused momentarily when Nico’s feet, his shoes began to crackle with yellow lightning. Was he about to run?

“Please don’t leave,” Bentley tried again, following him down the staircase. “Please. It’ll be okay — you can control it. You’ll learn.”

“How many people will die before I get it? Eight? Ten? Fifty?” Nico whipped the front door open and shook his hands out by his sides. “I have to go. I can't be here.”

Bentley opened his mouth to say something, but nothing came out. He took a breath but nothing came in. His lungs, hic chest began to constrict painfully, like all of the air had been vacuumed out of him. He brought a hand up to rest on his shirt, tugging at it to no avail. Don’t panic. Panicking would make it worse.

A glance up toward Nico, and Bentley saw his own deep brown eyes glowing white in the reflection of the window next to the door.

Okay, so panic. He really was going to die, wasn’t he? He tried his best to gasp and wheeze for air but nothing moved. His whole chest started to burn like it was on fire and he couldn’t speak to get Nico’s attention. He frantically tried to gasp in air that never came, and his eyes began to water — maybe from fear, maybe from the fact that his chest felt like it might explode, maybe both. He didn’t even realize Nico had seen him until his voice came:

“Bentley! No, hey, no, this can’t be happening!” 

Through his panic and the black that was beginning to creep into the edges of his vision, Bentley managed to comprehend that Nico’s white eyes were now very close to him, and his hands were resting on either side of his face. “No, stop it, breathe! Please breathe, please, please, please, please-“

Bentley’s lungs were burning like he’d breathed in a gallon of water and his heart was pounding out of his chest. Nico looked around desperately for help but, even in a Manor that housed a dozen on a good day, found none. Was this what it felt like to drown?

“I can’t make it stop, I can’t…” Nico cried, lurching forward and engulfing Bentley in a hug. “Please, please, please, please, please, please, please… Please, stop it. Please, stop it!”

Bentley was starting to feel more like a wet noodle than an actual person, and it was getting difficult to hold up his weight. Not to mention that the black in his vision was getting bigger. Was this really going to be the end of him? For real? He wasn’t even eleven yet. He couldn’t die before he’d made up with Damian.

“Please stop,” Nico begged. He was practically the only thing keeping Bentley from hitting the floor. Everything seemed to be buzzing, and he was really heavy, and his head and chest were so tight and on fire and burning.

Was he really going to die at Nico’s hand?

“Please stop,” Nico begged, and it seemed like he was talking to the torrential wind that was whipping the foyer’s curtains around — Bentley hadn’t even noticed how hard it was howling until then. How was no one else hearing it? “Please stop.”

Bentley’s vision was shot. His hearing was fading into a dull ring. He felt Nico’s arms tight around him, and he was dying.

“Stop it. Stop it, stop it, stop it!” Nico sobbed violently. He breathed in deep and groaned frustratedly, then shouted, loud enough that the whole house could probably hear him: “Stop it!”

And just like that, the wind stopped, and Bentley gasped.

Breathing air had never felt so good — his gasps slowly put out the fires that had erupted throughout his body and eased the tightness and pain in his chest. It felt like a whole new sensation, like the air was personally warding off the blackness in his vision and the ring in his ears. He choked on nothing and fell into a violent coughing fit as his body came back online.

“Oh my God!” Nico said, pulling back and examining Bentley to make sure he was actually, literally breathing. He was still sobbing, probably harder now, and had an iron grip on Bentley’s shoulders. “Oh my God. I almost… I almost…”

“It’s okay,” Bentley wheezed, coughing so hard he thought his lungs would splat on the floor. “It’s okay. I’m okay. I’m okay.”

Nico let go when he determined Bentley was stable enough, taking a few steps back and drawing his inhaler from a pocket in his pajama pants. “I almost killed you.” His dull blue eyes were trained on the floor, almost like he was dazed. “I almost killed you.”

“But you didn’t. You controlled it,” Bentley tried, still heaving and breathing heavily to replenish the oxygen in his body.

“But what happens next time? If I can’t?” Nico questioned, shaking and sucking on his inhaler a few times. His hands were shaking vigorously. Tears were still streaming down his face in an uncontrollable manner.

“You will. It’ll get easier,” He said. “Just… please stay.”

Nico put his inhaler away and wrapped his arms around himself, his whole body shaking with his sobs. “What if it doesn’t stop next time?”

“It will,” Bentley reassured. “Please — you said you needed me. I’m right here.”

He attempted a Bruce-move by opening his arms invitingly. “I trust you. Powers can't change that.”

Nico just sort of stared at him for a solid ten seconds. Bentley was about to call it quits and back down, but then Nico threw himself at him, wrapping his arms around his neck, sinking into it and crying like he hadn’t had a hug in weeks. (Little did Bentley know, he really hadn’t.)

They never realized that, despite the yelling and windstorm, absolutely no one else in the Manor had heard a thing.

—

dedicated to @sassenashsworld 💚

—

tag list! (If you want me to remove or add you, ask in comments!)

@fleur-alise @sarcopterygiian @flyrobinflyy @skylathescholar @gayboss-too-close-to-the-sun @xiaonothere

[maccreadysbaby]

A Hundred Ways to Become a Wayne

batfamily + oc insert

tw: none

wanna read more? here’s the table of contents!

want to read the first fic in the hundred days series so you understand what’s going on here? here it is!

short but crucial moments between the fam <3

part thirty-two

❝ REUNIONS ❞

TUESDAY — AUGUST 18 — 1:07PM

THE FIRST THING BENTLEY HEARD WAS THE BEEPING OF A HEART MONITOR. 

He took a deep breath. He was laying on something comfortable now, and his shoulder — the one that had been shot — felt like it had been tampered with. His right arm was close to his body and he couldn’t move it all that much. Something really warm was pressed up against the whole left side of his body, too.

His brain was still kind of hazy, but a different kind of hazy than before — less of a I’m-about-to-die haze, and more of a painkiller-high haze.

Still, all the painkillers could do was dull the endless aching that originated in his shoulder and reverberated through his bones. He wasn’t sure what had happened — did people stitch up bullet holes? — but it was still pretty painful. 

When he pulled his eyes open, he was blinded by the white lights of the cave’s medbay, and a shooting pain shot through his skull. He made a small whine of discomfort and squeezed them shut. Why were the lights so bright?

A hand landed gently on his forehead, and he almost started crying right then. Because it wasn’t Nico or Asten or Davis or just anyone touching him, it was the real deal, he was actually home, actually alive, and Bruce was actually touching him. He thought.

He peeled his eyes open again just to make sure, and the back of his eyes began to burn at the sight of Bruce, sitting in a chair not a foot from the bed in the batcave’s medbay, his grey-blue irises trained on Bentley’s face.

“Hey there, chum,”

Bentley looked away, (don’t cry, don’t cry, don’t cry, don’t cry, don’t cry, don’t cry, don’t cry.) and instead, focused on himself. He was wearing his own hand-me-down Wonder Woman pajamas now (he’d never loved them so much.) His right arm was in a blue sling, and there was an IV going into his left hand. Really, his entire body was aching in some way or another, but instead of dwelling on all of that, he looked over to the warm thing that was pressed into his left side. 

It ended up being a very worn-down looking Dick Grayson that was curled up on the edge of the hospital bed, sleeping soundly, with an IV of his own in his arm. His black hair was tousled and messy, hanging down over his eyes, and he looked paler than usual. One arm was folded beneath his head while the other was extended toward Bentley, resting on his left shoulder.

He was home.

He worked up the courage to look back at Bruce, but when he plastered on a reassuring smile, Bentley promptly peered into the rest of the cave. The Batcomputer was empty, and Bentley couldn’t see anyone else.

Bruce kept brushing his hand over his hair. “How are you feeling?”

Bentley thought about shrugging, but that would be stupid. He also thought about trying sign, but he didn’t have both hands. He definitely wasn’t going to talk, lest he burst into tears, so instead, he lifted his left hand ever so subtly and finger-spelled: bad.

Bruce took in a breath through his nose, a sort of hazy film covering his eyes as he continued to brush Bentley’s hair back soothingly. “I’m so proud of you, Bentley. You made it home.”

Bentley really had to stare at the ceiling, good and hard that time. Bruce was proud of him? Proud of him for running away, for chasing a supervillain, for breaking into someone’s cabin, for getting himself kidnapped? How was he ever supposed to work up the nerve to tell him all of that? Sure, he hadescaped, he had made it home, but not on his own, only after his idiotic decisions had gotten him there in the first place. There was nothing for Bruce to be proud of. 

You worthless waste of oxygen, John Whittaker’s voice came and left him blinking back a sting in his eyes. Why couldn’t he do anything right? Every time he tried to do something helpful or good it always ended up backfiring, getting him hurt, getting him kidnapped, getting him laid in a hospital bed with Wayne’s at his side. Why couldn’t he do anything right? This time he hadn’t even attempted it alone — he had friends at his side, and still, it was disastrous.

Bentley Whittaker, you are a walking disaster.

Why did the insult hurt worse now than it had then? His father always called him worthless, useless, a disaster. Did it hurt worse now because the Wayne’s went out of their way to tell him he wasn’t, but he still really, really was? And he knew he was? All the evidence was laid out neatly before him: Bentley Whittaker was a disaster. 

And still, they loved him.

Don’t cry, don’t cry, don’t cry. Bentley looked around the medbay to keep his eyes occupied, at the other hospital beds that were to either side of his. Much to his surprise, he was currently the only one in the medbay, if he didn’t count Dick. Alfred (who he hadn’t seen before.) was running tests on the other end of the room, and the beds that were once inhabited by Tim, Jason, and Damian were empty.

Slowly, he lifted his hand and finger-spelled: Damian?

Bruce smiled fondly. “He woke up… about twelve hours ago. Jason, too. They’re upstairs now.”

Bentley sighed softly, then spelled: Tim?

“He still isn’t feeling well, but he’s doing much better. He’s upstairs as well,” Bruce explained softly.

Bentley glanced over at Dick, his eyes traveling across the IV in his hand. Dick? He signed.

“He’s okay, just a little worn,” Bruce explained, making sure to keep that reassuring smile plastered on. “You were gone for twenty-six hours, and Nightwing was out searching for twenty-three of them. You’ve been in the cave for about thirteen.”

And that made Bentley feel even worse than he already did. He knew that’s not what Bruce intended by telling him that, but it’s what happened, anyway. So Bentley looked back at the too-bright ceiling with a small exhale.

Bruce moved his chair closer with a small squeak. “Should you ever want to talk about what happened, we’ll listen. But for now, we’re just relieved you’re home.”

Bentley said nothing, but like a bell that was coming to save him, Dick began to stir. It wasn’t but five seconds before his bright ocean blue eyes flitted open, focusing on the rest of the room, then Bruce, then Bentley. He inhaled sharply, his blue eyes very suddenly and quickly brimming with tears, before he hugged Bentley as gently as he could and his his face away in his hair.

Don’t cry, don’t cry, don’t cry, Bentley found himself saying again. There was suddenly a hand in front of his face that finger-spelled: I love you.

So Dick still wasn’t talking, then. Bentley had forgotten about that part. He didn’t mind, though — staring at various parts of the batcave was good enough for him. Communicating thoroughly wasn’t really on his radar at that point anyhow.

For a while (a long while) Dick just cried. Which was fine. Bentley just let him. It felt like he was being eaten alive by guilt, anyways, so the least he could do was let Dick cry it out with him.

Dick’s pain was his fault, his mind kept saying. Everyone’s pain was his fault. Bentley’s. His father was the one who ran the experimenting facility. His father was testing the Synchronizers on other people so he could eventually do it to him. If he’d have just gone through with his father’s plan last year, Keene and his metahumans wouldn’t have a vendetta against Batman. The Secret Keeper wouldn’t be attacking them. If he’d have just done what he was told for once in his life, people wouldn’t be dead, his family wouldn’t be hurt, and Gotham would be fine.

Everything was always his fault. Why couldn’t he do anything right?

He forced himself to keep it together and stared at the ceiling some more. There had to be a way for him to fix this. To destroy the whole empire his father had built, for his family. There had to be a way to do it without involving Asten and Nico, so they wouldn’t get in trouble. There had to be a way to do it alone. Himself, so he’d stop hurting people. Didn’t there?

You’ve gotten yourself into this hole, claw yourself out, John Whittaker’s voice came.

He could do that. He could. After all, John Whittaker didn’t give up. He stillhadn’t. And John Whittaker’s blood was running through Bentley Whittaker’s veins.

He could fix it all.

But for now, fixing it looked like giving Dick a shoulder to cry on. And he could do that.

So he did.

—

The second time he woke up, someone was talking.

“I about decided I didn't like it so much, though, when I spotted that red Corvair trailing me. I was almost two blocks from home then, so I started walking a little faster. I had never been jumped, but I had seen Johnny after four Socs got hold of him, and it wasn't pretty. Johnny was scared of his own shadow after that. Johnny was sixteen then,”

Bentley pulled his heavy eyes open, glancing around the medbay. Dick was no longer at his side, and there was only one person in his vision — the one reading his favorite book to him.

When Bentley fully comprehended that Bruce’s seat had been taken by a certain Wayne with white-streaked hair, he pushed himself up.

“Jason?”

It was the first word he’d forced out since he’d made it to the doorstep of Wayne Manor, all raspy and weird sounding. Jason looked up at him, his bluish eyes dull with something Bentley couldn’t place. He was wearing a hoodie that Bentley was pretty sure he’d seen Dick wear before, and he had the hardcover The Outsiders in one hand.

CRACK!

Dad!

CRACK!

CRACK!

The sounds of a crowbar hitting flesh plagued his mind, and all of his keeping it together seemed to be futile. He hadn’t let himself cry thus far, not when Dick was crying, not when Bruce was talking to him, not ever. But now, when Jason was looking at him with his little white streak that was hanging down near his forehead, reading to him with his Crime Alley drawl, healthy and here and alive, Bentley didn’t have enough willpower to stifle the burn behind his eyes.

“Hey, kid. What’s going on?” Jason asked gently, lowering the book until it rested on the edge of the bed. Bentley brought his left arm up to cover his eyes, but it wasn’t much use. He let out a few small, pitiful sounding sobs anyways.

“Do you want me to go get Dick?” Jason continued, somewhat anxiously as he glanced around the cave. “I’ll go get Dick.”

“No!” Bentley croaked, uncovering his face and scrubbing at his teary eyes. “Don’t go.”

Jason didn’t move, but he didn’t exactly seem comfortable, either. Man, Bentley was just screwing stuff up left and right, wasn’t he?

“I just… Can I… have a hug?”

He really didn’t know what to expect from Jason — he’d always been particular about touching Bentley, abuse survivor to abuse survivor, so maybe the question was totally  out of bounds. Maybe Bentley should’ve thought about it first. (He wasn’t very good at that anymore.)

Jason steeled for a moment, blinking just a couple times, and Bentley looked away, trying (and failing) to stop crying. Jason was next to him and Jason was alive. He wasn’t  Robin, he wasn’t dead in a warehouse. He was alive.

After a moment, Jason replied: “Yeah. Yeah, you can.”

Bentley moved to the edge of the hospital bed sort of awkwardly. The whole thing was kind of awkward, actually, since Bentley was on the bed and Jason was in a chair, but they ended up making it work. Bentley rested his head on Jason’s shoulder and looped his (one) arm around his neck. He could feel his pulse under his fingers — he was alive.

Bentley sniffled deeply, tightening his hold ever-so-slightly. “I’m so glad you’re alive,” He whispered as a few more tears rolled freely down his face.

Jason tensed for a brief moment, and not a word fell from his lips. Had he ever been told that before?

A moment later, the tenseness left, and Jason let out an exhale.

“I’m glad you’re alive,” He replied, his voice thick with something Bentley couldn’t place. 

So was he. He was glad he was alive and Jason was alive and Tim was alive and Dick was alive and Damian was alive and everybody was alive… except maybe Davis.

That sent a pang of sadness ringing through him, and he balled up the back of Jason’s hoodie in his hand. He squeezed his eyes shut when a new wave of tears shook his body for a completely different reason. “I’m really scared.”

Jason adjusted his arms around him. “No one’s going to touch you here,” He replied, exhaling. “I promise.”

For some reason, it sounded more like a threat than a promise. But not a threat toward Bentley.

The child hid his face away  in the hoodie. “I love you.”

There was another moment where Jason tensed, and Bentley was afraid he’d said the wrong thing. Maybe he did. Why would he say that? He held onto Jason in fear he might let go of him.

But he didn’t. 

“Bruce said you read to me,” Jason said, and Bentley felt his hand move ever so slightly on his back. “I could hear you sometimes.”

Bentley sniffed. “I messed up a lot.”

“I was stuck. In the same memory over and over. I would’ve lost my mind if I couldn’t hear you,” He explained softly. “So, thank you. And I… I love you, too, kid.”

Oh, great, now Bentley was really crying. He wasn’t a hundred percent sure, but he could probably guess what memory Jason had been stuck in — the same one that Bentley had seen in the Synchronizer. And, by extension, it was all his fault. 

How was he supposed to fix a problem so big? Every time he’d tried it just seemed to multiply. Maybe he wasn’t hitting the right places.

If you’re killing a man, you shoot for the heart. If you’re killing a snake, you chop its head off. He didn’t need to go for the Secret Keeper or Dr. Keene or any other branch of the operation — he needed to aim for the most vital part, the source of it all.

Bentley needed to go see his father.

But right now, he settled for hugging Jason.

—

dedicated to @sassenashsworld 💚

—

tag list! (If you want me to remove or add you, ask in comments!)

@fleur-alise @sarcopterygiian @flyrobinflyy @skylathescholar @gayboss-too-close-to-the-sun @xiaonothere

[maccreadysbaby]

A Hundred Ways to Become a Wayne

batfamily + oc insert

tw: contemplated s**cide

wanna read more? here’s the table of contents!

want to read the first fic in the hundred days series so you understand what’s going on here? here it is!

im sorry but also no I’m not

part thirty-six

❝ OVER THE EDGE (ALMOST) ❞

THURSDAY — SEPTEMBER 3 — 9:00AM

BENTLEY WAS REALLY COLD. 

“Don’t worry, Babybird — I won’t tell your secrets,”

Bentley breathed in and out three times before he could see. His breath was coming out as clouds of vapor in front of him, rising into the air. All he could see was the sky. A big, black mass peppered with millions of tiny twinkling stars, and a huge, bright full moon.

He blinked. There was a familiar dull ache at the base of his skull, and his muscles were kind of sore, in a strange, prickly kind of way. He was laying on something really hard and really cold. The wind was blowing, the freezing temperatures biting at his exposed skin and making it burn.

With a grunt of discomfort, he sat up. He was laying on the roof of a building in the freezing cold. The night’s sky was above, and over the concrete ledge that kept people from falling off the roof, Gotham was glowing. He had to be at least fifteen or twenty stories in the air. 

The city looked much brighter from up there. He pushed himself off of the rooftop and stepped closer to the edge, peering off at the view. He could see a lot — more than he’d ever seen. Hundreds of buildings and tons of cars moving and people walking and… so many lights. Lights everywhere, all shining and twinkling. He blinked, utterly taken aback by the view.

In the distance, a large light flickered to life, projecting an image into the sky.

A bat.

Bentley stared in awe, a phantom of a smile quirking up on his lips. That was the signal people used to call Batman, right? 

For a while, he just looked off the edge of the building, watching the cars, the people, the lights. At one point, he was pretty sure he saw Batman on a rooftop.

And then he realized someone was crying.

Bentley turned toward the sound, towards other side of the rooftop for the first time. More night’s sky and Gotham lights were visible past it, but that wasn’t what drew his attention — it was the person sitting on the ledge, their legs dangling freely over the sidewalk at least fifteen stories below. They were small.

Bentley glanced around, catching sight of the door that led to the roof, which was sitting slightly open. With a few hesitant steps forward, Bentley muttered: “Excuse me?”

They didn’t move. Their silhouette was nearly solid black from where Bentley was standing, outlined with lights and stars. They were shaking slightly, and he could hear them sniffling and sobbing quietly. 

“Excuse me?” He tried again, stepping forward. “Are you okay?”

Nothing. 

Bentley, slowly and steadily, made his way to the ledge about twenty feet from them, so he could see their face.

With the Gotham lights shining toward them now, he could see exactly who it was — it was Asten. He was holding his cell-phone in his hands with tears streaming down his face in a way Bentley hadn’t seen since he watched his parents die. His hair was a lighter blue than he remembered, and he looked… younger? Maybe? Only a little. He had on his Gotham Academy uniform, and his left eye was bruised spectacularly, making way for his bleeding nose. Well, it wasn’t bleeding anymore, but there was still blood on his face and peppered on his clothes that he hadn’t bothered to clean off. He was sniffling and spluttering pitifully, kind of like Nico at the bus stop, or Bentley after his first nightmare with the Secret Keeper.

“Asten?” Bentley tried, but of course, he went unheard. He waved one of his hands out toward his friend, but he didn’t see it. Why couldn’t anyone see him?

There were messages coming into Asten’s phone like mad. Since Bentley couldn’t be seen, he stepped closer, peering down at the screen.

Asten was texting Nico, and the texts he was receiving seemed to be a panicked, jumbled mess of where are you, his name, and the word please a whole lot. Bentley glanced up at Asten, who was staring at it but not typing back. His phone rang; he declined it. It rang again. He declined it again.

Bentley glanced around the empty rooftop again. The building was easily one of the tallest in the area — how did Asten even get up there? And why? He wished he could be seen, so he could help. Why was he crying?

Asten pulled a small, crumpled sheet of paper out of his pants pocket, and upon closer examination, Bentley realized it was a photograph of him and his parents. The cold breeze came and went again. It blew Asten’s hair around and made the little paper dance.

Bentley frowned in sympathy, glancing up at Asten, who was staring blankly at the photo. Texts were still coming in from Nico, one after another like clockwork.

Asten looked down at his phone, and with shaky fingers, typed a reply to Nico’s texts.

Everything would be easier if I was just dead.

Wasn’t that almost the exact same thing Bentley had said to Nico?

Bentley watched in silence as Asten sat his phone and photo off to the side, on the ledge next to him, staring off into the distance. There were texts and calls coming in like mad. The breeze whipped and blew as Asten moved, climbing off of the ledge and then right back on, this time, standing on it instead of sitting.

Bentley blinked. In an instant he was hearing his heart in his ears, and he reached for Asten’s ankle only for his hand to go through it, just like it had with Bruce when he watched Jason die.

“Asten,” He muttered, even though he knew it wouldn’t be heard. He blinked. Was Asten about to… I mean, Bentley had never seen… never thought… “Asten? Hey, Asten, please.”

The lights of Gotham were reflecting in Asten’s green eyes, tears and tear-streaks gleaming in the illumination. The breeze was whipping his blue hair and Gotham Academy uniform around. Bentley, panicked, reached for him again to no avail.

“Asten,” He repeated, moving closer. “Asten.”

Asten stared off the ledge, down at the sidewalk with people moving to and fro on it. He hiccuped, watching the people move closely, intently. Was he waiting… for them to get out of the way?

“Asten,” Bentley tried, his eyes becoming a little misty. “Asten, please get down.”

He didn’t. Instead, he actually moved closer to the edge like it didn’t even matter. Bentley reached for him again. It didn’t work.

“Asten, please, don’t,” He practically begged, the back of his eyes burning. What in the heck were you supposed to say to someone who was… like this?

Something changed about Asten’s eyes — about his whole face. He stopped crying. He seemed… normal. Calm. He didn’t look troubled anymore. Bentley looked down. There was no one on the sidewalk.

He quickly looked back up at Asten with a “No!” That went unheard.

Something moved behind them.

“You think we’re gonna have a blizzard tomorrow?”

Bentley and Asten both flinched in tandem when a familiar voice pierced the air. Asten didn’t turn, but his calmness left instead, and closed his eyes with a shaky breath and sent a few more tears down his face.

Bentley, however, did turn. He blinked blankly at a sight he hadn’t really expected — Red Hood was crouching in the center of the rooftop, his helmet still tight on his head.

Asten said nothing to Jason’s left field question, balling his hands into fists by his sides so tightly his knuckles turned white. 

“Have you ever seen a superhero before?”

“Piss off,” Was Asten’s whispered reply, bringing a hand up to rub at his crying eyes. “Go away.”

“What’s your name?”

Asten grumbled in annoyance. “Piss off.”

Jason moved only about a millimeter closer, still crouched. “Would it hurt to tell me if you’re just going to jump anyways?”

For a moment, Asten got lost in thought, squeezing his hands tighter. He swallowed thickly, looking down off the ledge, at the sidewalk and road below.

“Asten,” He muttered, a hiccup breaking up the word in the middle.

Jason nodded. “Asten. How old are you?”

There was another moment of silence where Bentley just stood still, watching. Listening.

“Twelve,”

Jason shifted uncomfortably, and he seemed to look around before he continued: “Your phone is ringing. You know who’s calling?” It wasn’t his Jason voice or even his Red Hood voice. It was his Robin voice.

Asten didn’t reply to that one, but instead, shuffled his toes closer to the edge of the building. Bentley’s hand drifted up to his mouth and stayed there, and Jason moved, albeit slowly, closer.

“Don’t try to talk me out of it,” Asten muttered with a quiet sob, wiping at his eyes. “It won’t work.”

“I’m not. I’m just talking,” Jason replied smoothly, standing up. “I’ve been in the same position before, myself. I know how it feels; so jump.”

Asten’s eyes widened, and he looked backwards for the first time, eyes lingering on Jason’s helmet. “What?”

Jason inched forward until he was next to Asten, his boots against the ledge. “If you really have no hope at all; no one that loves you, no one that you can count on — if you really have nothing left that makes you happy, a person, an object, an activity that makes waking up in the morning worth it… then jump.”

Asten started to cry harder, bringing his hands up to his face.

Jason’s head turned subtly in the direction of Asten’s eternally buzzing phone. “But I have a feeling that isn’t the case.”

Asten said nothing, crying nearly uncontrollably into the sleeves of his Gotham Academy blazer. “I hate it here.”

“So did I,”

Asten tugged at his own hair, squeezing until his knuckles turned white again. “Why… didn’t you… jump?”

Jason breathed in and out deeply. “My brother cared enough to show up before I could.”

Just then, a round of two or three sirens faded softly into Bentley’s earshot, and Asten turned on a dime, glaring dangerously at Jason with a fire in his eyes. “You called the cops?”

“No,” The Red Hood replied lowly, grabbing Asten’s phone and holding it up so he could see the caller ID on the screen. It said Nico. “But I bet I know who did.”

Bentley watched in silence as more time passed, and two cop cars screeched to a halt at the bottom of the building they were on top of, followed by a black Mercedes. All three of the cars’ doors flew open, and people piled out, including a certain blonde who still had his phone pressed into his ear, who left the police in his dust to get inside the building.

Jason held his hand out, up toward Asten. His other hand was holding onto the grappling gun he had on his hip. “You wanna come down so you can talk to him?”

Asten stayed on the ledge for a few moments, shaking, crying, contemplating everything and nothing. It was probably the scariest few moments Bentley had ever witnessed. 

Silence continued to pass until the door to the roof swung open, and Nico flew out, followed closely by his parents. He had obviously been bawling his eyes out, and let out a very desperate sounding: “Asten.”

That’s when Asten caved, reaching back and taking Jason’s hand. The vigilante grabbed him steadily by the arms and helped him off of the ledge, crying and all. Nico ran to him.

Bentley’s head felt like it was caving in. Splitting pain radiated from one side of his skull to the other, his limbs went limp, and the surface of the rooftop was hard when he hit it. With a groan of agony, he reached toward Red Hood’s boot.

Everything went black.

And then he jumped awake again, gasping deeply. He blinked a few times — they were in the bedroom with Asten. 

Right. The bedroom. Asten — he was sick. The Secret Keeper. Reality was coming back to him — he and Nico, after their fight with the Secret Keeper, had gone upstairs, stayed utterly silent, and didn’t move. (Typical of them, right? If they weren’t panicking they seemed to not do much of anything at all.)

Bentley was curled in a ball on the loveseat, his head close to something else small that he quickly realized was a sleeping Nico. Sunlight was streaming in from the windows, Asten was still limp in the bed, and Jason was in one of two chairs situated near the door, reading a book to himself. His cell phone was laying face down on the arm of the seat. The clock next to Asten’s bed read 9:01am.

Apparently Jason and Asten had more of a history than Bentley realized. Maybe that’s why Jason was here? Even though Asten didn’t know it was him?

“Bad dream?” Jason questioned softly, and despite already knowing he was very much awake and alert, Bentley jumped at the sound of his voice. 

“Mhm,” He hummed quietly, sitting up and re-situating himself.

“Secret Keeper stuff?”

“Mhm,” He repeated. 

A moment of silence ensued, and Bentley dug his phone out of his pocket, piddling around with it for a few moments. He glanced at his friends. Asten was still unresponsive and limp in the bed, the washcloth laying on his head and IV in his arm. Nico was curled up in a tiny ball on the other side of the loveseat, beneath the same blue blanket that Bentley had been under. 

He stared at his phone for a few more moments before he texted Jason: I saw a memory. You getting Asten off a ledge.

Jason’s phone dinged. He picked it up, read the message, and then glanced up at Bentley. They shared a moment of silent eye contact. Jason’s thumbs were hovering, but not moving, so Bentley typed again.

You said you’d been in that position before.

Neither of them looked up, but the air in the room seemed to get thicker. Bentley listened for the telltale little taps of Jason’s fingers, but they never came. So, instead of ignoring it like he typically would, he sent another text.

Would you have really done it? Jumped?

More silence, this time even more tense, thicker. Jason’s typing bubbles came up and went away a few times, and then his message came through:

Back then? I think so.

Bentley typed again. Why didn’t you?

Dick showed up.

Bentley glanced up at Jason, blinking at the way his phone light was illuminating his white streak. Jason didn’t take his eyes off of the screen. He’d told Bentley first hand about being at rock bottom, so maybe this was what he was talking about when he said he got close to death again? It gave Bentley a weird feeling. 

Would you do it now? Was the next message Jason got.

Typing bubbles came and went on Bentley’s phone again, before a one-word text came through: No.

Bentley exhaled a breath he didn’t even know he’d been holding.

You promise? 

“I promise, Bentley,”

He glanced up at Jason, who was looking back at him with his white streak and greenish-blue eyes. 

More quietness passed.

“Jason?”

“Hm?”

Bentley blinked a few times, his eyes moving here and there, not settling anywhere for too long. The mental image of Jason on a ledge like Asten was made the back of his eyes burn. The fact that Jason had gotten to that point before. 

Bentley blinked again, clearing his throat subtly. Glanced at his friends to make sure they were really asleep. “I watched you die,” He whispered. “When I was kidnapped, I… saw it.”

Jason breathed out, shifting on the chair, becoming increasingly uncomfortable. He opened his mouth; nothing came out.

“The Joker, I was… and I couldn’t…” Bentley took a breath. “I saw all of it.”

No one spoke.

“I already told you but I… want you to know that…” Bentley sighed, running a hand through his hair. “I’m really, really glad you’re alive.”

Another long spurt of silence passed. Bentley just sort of looked at Asten, watching his chest rise and fall beneath the quilt.

“Kid…”

“You don’t have to say anything if you don’t want to,” Bentley continued, glancing up at Jason, who looked oddly tense. “It’s okay.”

So Jason didn’t say anything.

Bentley picked at the bottom of the blanket. “I don’t know why she shows me this stuff. I’ve seen a ton of things — she showed me some of the different futures I could have. I’ve seen… me die… and you were, uh, trying to save me. In a glowing green pool. I saw my headstone.”

Jason’s eyes traveled back up to Bentley and bounced around for a few moments, his expression darkening at his words. “You aren’t going to die.”

Bentley looked down at his hands. “I also saw one where I was… back with my dad. And I… helped him, uh…” He trailed off, staring intently at the cushions of the loveseat. “And I saw where I was Robin and Tim was Batman.”

Jason didn’t speak, but he had a detective-y look on his face again.

“I just want to make the right choices. To unlock a good one,” Bentley continued with a sigh. “Which is why I need your help.”

Jason leaned forward in his chair. “Kid-“

“It’s not hard. You can say no, I just…” He squeezed the blanket between his fingers. “I want to go visit my father.”

Silence.

“And I want you to take me,”

—

dedicated to @sassenashsworld 💚

—

tag list! (If you want me to remove or add you, ask in comments!)

@fleur-alise @sarcopterygiian @flyrobinflyy @skylathescholar @gayboss-too-close-to-the-sun @xiaonothere

[maccreadysbaby]

A Hundred Ways to Become a Wayne

batfamily + oc insert

tw: death and gore

wanna read more? here’s the table of contents!

want to read the first fic in the hundred days series so you understand what’s going on here? here it is!

he’s gonna get home soon I promise :,) also the end of this chapter makes me SQUEEEAAALLLL

part thirty

❝ ASPHYXIATION ❞

MONDAY — AUGUST 17 — 9:52PM

BENTLEY ONLY STEPPED OUT OF THE ROOM WHEN DAVIS MADE A HIGH-PITCHED WHISTLE.

He grabbed Davis’s other metal glove off the white tile floor and, upon stepping into the hall, was met by a spread of half a dozen bodies. Three men with lab coats, three men with armored jumpsuits and guns, all laying, unresponsive, with black crawling beneath their skin. Davis was standing right in the middle.

Bentley had never seen so many people… die.

“Stay close. This whole hallway has Synchronizing rooms on it, so we’ll have to check them all,” Davis ordered. Bentley followed behind and said nothing as they approached a metal door, right across from the room he’d been in. 

The hallway was almost endless in both directions; so long and bright and white that Bentley got a little dizzy when he looked down it. They were never going to find them, were they?

Davis retracted a keycard from his pocket — one he’d stolen off a guard, maybe? — and tapped it on a little blue light next to the door. The light turned green, there was a click, and the metal door slid open.

The room was just like his own, with nothing inside but a solid white Synchronizer. Davis made for the control panel next to it, and Bentley stayed near the door, looking down the long, white hallways. At the pile of men laying in it, skin turning black.

Asten and Nico could be in any room. What if they didn’t get to them in time? What if they already had superpowers? Or mind control devices put in them? 

Davis messed around with the keypad for a few grueling moments, during which Bentley stared nervously down the hall for more guards to appear. Suddenly, there was a click and a hiss, and a girl came tumbling out of the Synchronizer in a hospital gown that matched theirs, landing on her hands and knees on the floor. She was older — probably Davis’s age, with bright red hair kinda like Bentley’s, heaving for breath.

“Exchange incomplete. Please return subject to Synchronizer,”

The girl disappeared.

But she was still there, Bentley could hear her breathing. She was just… invisible.

Davis left the room without a word to her, careful to keep his hands far from Bentley as he passed him in the doorway. “C’mon.”

Bentley glanced at him, then looked back into the room, at the girl he couldn’t see. “You’re just going to leave her?”

“Your friends have timers on their heads,” Davis said, running a black hand through his hair. His green eyes were shining with something like remorse, despair, maybe rage somewhere deep in them. “We don’t have time to save everyone.”

Bentley spent a few more seconds looking in the direction of the invisible girl. She was invisible, so maybe she’d be able to escape on her own, right?

That’s what he settled on, anyways, because Davis trailed back into the hallway and he had to follow him. But as soon as he crossed the threshold into the hall-

BANG! 

Bentley cried out when he heard the deafening boom of a gun. There were more men in the hallway now, four of them in their white security suits coming from the left, with guns trained on the pair. They were standing near the pile of men Davis had already killed.

Bentley was being shot at.

Davis opened the door to the next Synchronizing room and Bentley ran inside without a second thought, Davis ducking in right after. Deafening and horrible gunshots kept coming, BANG! BANG! BANG! Even though the guards didn’t have anything to aim for anymore.

Why was it when Bentley and Davis were together, there were always people with guns?

“Go open the Synchronizer. I’ll handle these guys,” Davis ordered. “There’s an emergency eject button — you can’t miss it.”

Bentley nodded quickly, scanning the identical room before shuffling over to the glowing control panel next to the Synchronizer. There were so many buttons, each glowing a slightly different color with words and abbreviations on top. He let Davis’s metal gloves clatter onto the floor and lifted his hands, trying to find the button Davis had spoken about. Emergency Eject was what he said.

The door to the room slid open with a beep. Bentley turned just in time to flinch when a guard rounded the corner pistol-first and pulled the trigger blindly, the bullet clanging dangerously against the back wall. He saw Davis reach over and grab the guy by the neck, black spreading there.

“Bentley!” He barely managed to hear Davis’s shout over the ringing in his ears.

The child took that as a queue for him to hurry, so he focused back on the control panel, his heartbeat and adrenaline pumping in his ears with heavy, loud pulses. He finally spotted a red button in the very top corner labeled EJECT. So he slammed his fist down on it.

And his entire arm lit on fire.

The thud from the second guard hitting the floor came at the same time a boy with black hair thudded out of the Synchronizer. Probably, like, Tim’s age. Bentley couldn’t tell. Why was his arm burning?

“Exchange incomplete. Please return subject to synchronizer,”

Bentley glanced down, and his vision swam.

Red. So much red. All over his arm, dripping down his fingertips and making dots on the floor. His white gown was turning red from his right shoulder down. There was a little blood spattered across the room, on the wall, near a skid mark left by a bullet. Bentley blinked, mind blank.

There was no way. Surely it would’ve hurt so much worse… there was no way he wouldn’t have noticed, if he’d gotten…

There was blood all over him, and his arm was on fire. Davis hadn’t yelled at him because he needed him to hurry. He’d yelled at him because…

Because Bentley…

…had been shot.

The realization made him sway on his feet, and he ended up against the control panel as Davis struck down the final two guards with only a finger, his vision swirling with red that he was trying so hard not to look at. There was no way. There was no way.

“Davis…?”

Bentley saw people moving — the black haired boy ran out of the room, Davis ran all the way in — but he was having trouble seeing through all the blood. The frantic click, click, click, click, click of Davis putting his gloves back on pierced the air. It was really cold in the room. Like, ice cold, but Bentley’s arm was so, so hot.

He stood, somewhat in disbelief. There was no way. Why didn’t it hurt worse? Why was he just hot?

“He shot me,” Bentley said as Davis’s face came back into focus, near to his own. Why didn’t it hurt worse? Davis was kneeling in front of him, fastening his gloves.

“He shot me,” He whispered, more to himself than Davis. Forcing himself to realize what had happened, that he wasn’t dreaming or hallucinating. He looked down at the red drenching his white hospital gown, blinking rapidly as the burn in his arm seemed to extend to his eyes. “He shot me!”

“It’s okay,” Davis replied, bringing his hands up to the hem of Bentley’s hospital gown and tearing a strip off of the bottom with his metal gloves. “It’s okay… You’ll be okay. The bullet went all the way through. That’s good.”

Oh my God. A bullet went through his shoulder. A bullet went through his shoulder.

Black dots started to come and dance in Bentley’s vision, and it became increasingly difficult to keep himself upright. He could feel Davis messing with his shoulder, but he couldn’t bring himself to look at it. All he was looking at was the many droplets of blood peppering the floor. At his own crimson fingers.

He’d been shot by a gun.

As the realization finally seemed to click into place — that Bentley had actually, literally, seriously been shot by a gun — the pain hit him like a semi-truck. Like his whole arm had been ripped off, hacked off one grueling chop at a time by a hatchet.

There was so much pain and so much blood and so much red and he couldn’t see and he couldn’t breathe and he couldn’t think and… everything started turning black.

“No, no, hey, don’t faint. We don’t have time for you to faint,” There was a gloved hand on the back of his head, keeping him from falling over, and his vision swam back to life just as quickly as it had gone. “You’re fine. You’re okay. No need to faint. It’s not that bad. It’s scary, but it’s not that bad. You’re okay.”

There was what felt like a tug on his injured arm, and a glance over revealed that the strip of hospital gown fabric had been tied there like a makeshift bandage. Red was already staining it, seeping through it.

Bentley breathed in, and the exhale mixed with the searing agony made him nauseous. He was pretty sure he was dying. “I-I want to go home.”

“I know. I know you do,”

He instinctively tried to cover his face, but he couldn’t. It shot pain all the way up his arm and into the rest of his body like a firework, burning agony ripping through all of his muscles and veins. A sound that reminded him vaguely of a puppy worked it’s way out of him, and boiling tears sprung up in his eyes at the pain.

“It hurts,” Bentley cried, the hot tears streaming down his face before he could even think about stopping them. The pain was making his legs seem weak, and like some childish instinct, he reached for the man in front of him. “It hurts, Davis. It hurts so bad…”

“I know. I know,” Davis repeated, his eyes bridging the gap between worried and all-out panicked as they flicked across all the red in the white room. “I’ve gotcha. I’ve gotcha.”

Bentley was suddenly gathered up in Davis’s arms when the latter stood, which was fine, because he wasn’t sure how much longer his legs would last. “Just… I just need you to keep talking to me. We’ll find your friends. We’ll get through this.”

Davis was holding Bentley bridal style, and his injured — shot — right shoulder was now bleeding on the older boy’s gown. He didn’t seem to care, and that was good. Bentley choked down a few sobs at the searing pain that came with being moved, laying his forehead against Davis’s shoulder. “It hurts so bad.”

“I know it does, buddy. I know. Just… just talk to me about something. About your home. You live in Wayne Manor, right? Why don’t you tell me about all your siblings?” Davis questioned. Bentley could feel him moving, but didn’t look up.

“Uh…” He started, hiccuping lightly, using his uninjured hand to grab onto the front of Davis’s gown. “Davis, I can’t-“

“Yes, you can. Go ahead. I’m listening,”

“Uh… Damian… is the youngest,” He forced out, trying to bring his knees up even though he wasn’t really moving all that much. “He’s still older than me. And he… likes animals. A lot.”

Bentley felt air rushing at him, and the subtle ups and downs of Davis’s footsteps. “He has a big dog.”

Davis inhaled. “Oh, yeah? What’s it's name?”

“Titus,” 

“Titus is a good name for a big dog,” He commented. 

“Yeah. He… got sick last year,” Bentley explained quietly, trying to push away the fiery pulsing in his arm. (It was kind of hard to push it away when it felt like he had lava instead of blood.) He exhaled heavily, shakily, and it tapered off into a few soft cries. “Davis, it hurts.”

There was a beep of a door opening. “Keep talking to me, bud. Is Titus okay now?”

“Mhm,” Bentley muttered, his fingertips and bare toes growing such an icy cold that it hurt a little bit. “I’m getting cold.”

“Who’s the next oldest? After Damian?” 

Bentley found himself shivering as air wafted past him again. “Duke. He drives me to school. He… is graduating. This year… I think.”

There was a sound, like Davis tapping something with his metal glove. The hiss and beep of a Synchronizer came.

“Exchange incomplete. Please return subject to Synchronizer,”

Bentley looked up, just quick enough to see a…

Blonde girl.

“We’re not going to find them fast enough,” He whined, putting his face back where it was with a trio of bitter sobs. “I’m so dumb. If… If I wouldn’t have-”

“We will find them,” Davis reassured, cutting the child off mid-sentence. “Who comes after Duke?”

Bentley breathed in, biting his lip to stifle a few more cries. The pain was subsiding the slightest, slightest bit… being replaced by a foggy, empty feeling like he felt after waking up in the hospital. “Um… Steph? Or Tim? I-I can’t remember. I don’t feel good.”

Davis’s thumb moved in circles on his back, and the strange sensation of air blowing as he walked returned. “How old are they?”

“Uh… both… eighteen. No, wait, nineteen. Maybe,” It was getting way too hard for Bentley to think. Why couldn’t he remember how old Tim was? “I’m… tired.”

“No, no. Keep going. C’mon, you’re okay,” 

Bentley shivered. “Tim is… sick. Right now. He likes… computers. And Steph likes purple. She made me a sweater… last Christmas. Am I going to die?”

“What? No!” Davis shook Bentley the slightest bit, and the child winced from the pain it caused. “Who’s next?”

There was a beep — a door lock. “Cass. She… uh… taught me ASL,” Bentley explained, fighting away the fog that was threatening to take over and make it impossible to stay awake. “She doesn’t talk much. And then comes… uh…”

Then comes Jason.

Bentley bit his lip again, his shoulders shaking with a few quiet sobs as the scene from the Synchronizer returned to his mind. Robin. The Joker. “Then Jason…” He let go of Davis’s gown to bring a hand to his mouth, in an attempt to quiet his cries. “Jason… I miss him… so much.”

“You’ll be home soon,” Davis replied. A beep and a hiss came, and Bentley looked up, watching the Synchronizer they were beside open up. Vapor plumed out, dancing across the floor, and the metal clasps on the inside opened. Someone fell out, thumping on their hands and knees.

Someone with blue hair.

Bentley abandoned all rational thought, squirming in Davis’s arms with a sudden: “Asten!”

Thankfully, Davis didn’t drop him — because moving that much hurt so bad that Bentley got lightheaded. He blinked until it faded, and Davis slowly put him down on his feet, gloved hands hovering nearby, just in case.

Bentley went a solid two steps and then dropped to his knees next to Asten, bringing his arms up and around the Brazilian’s shoulders no matter how much fire it sent rippling through his bones. He kept crying — maybe from fear, maybe from pain, maybe from relief, maybe from everything.

Asten was…

He was crying, too.

He was on his hands and knees, trembling like he’d been dipped in a freezing cold lake. He was wearing the exact same white Hospital gown everyone wore. His shoulders were shaking the lightest bit, and without even looking up, he leaned into his friend with a soft: “Bentley…”

It was quiet and plagued with a kind of pain Bentley didn’t even know how to decipher.

“Asten,” He replied near-inaudibly, bringing his uninjured hand up to hold Asten’s head closer to him. He tried his best to keep the searing agony out of his voice, for his friend’s sake, but he wasn’t sure he was doing a very good job. “It’s… okay. You’re out of that thing now.”

Asten cried, one of his hands finding Bentley’s (thankfully) un-shot arm and holding onto it tightly. “I’m so sorry.”

Bentley didn’t know what he was apologizing for, but it made him cry harder anyways. “I-It’s okay.”

Silence passed. “Your father…”

Bentley blinked. Asten and Nico always called Bruce his dad, not his father. So did that mean, when Asten was in the Synchronizer, that he saw… not Bruce, but John? Had he seen Bentley’s life before the Wayne’s?

“I couldn’t make him stop, I don’t…” Asten trailed off, dissolving into the most pitiful bout of crying Bentley had ever witnessed. Never had he ever imagined he’d see Asten like this.

Bentley choked down as much of the crying as he could. “It’s okay,” It ended up sounding very much like I’m-trying-so-hard-not-to-absolutely-sob-right-now instead.

Asten adjusted his head with a deep sniffle. “You... You… Where…? What happened?”

“Dr. Keene took us. To the place in the video. Put us… in the machine,” Bentley explained quietly. His left hand was moving in Asten’s hair without any prior thought, which was good, because he would’ve been awfully embarrassed if he’d realized he was doing it. “We have to leave.”

Asten lifted his head, and immediately, his bloodshot, green eyes tripled in size, and he choked on whatever he was going to say. Instead he suddenly jerked back, peeling Bentley’s arms away from himself and holding them off to each side. Bentley cried out at the sudden and terrible pain it caused. “You’re… covered in blood…”

“He’s going to be okay,” Davis interjected, moving toward the pair. Asten’s eyes shot up to him, then bounced around the room. The Brazilian promptly stopped crying in the presence of a stranger, and instead, looked suddenly and utterly pissed.

He sat back on his knees with a scowl, dropping Bentley’s arms. “And who the hell are you?”

Bentley winced as the momentary adrenaline of finding Asten began to wear off, sniffing. “It’s okay. He’s my friend.”

Asten looked at Bentley, then back over at Davis. “Does this mean we’re all…?”

Bentley, assuming the word missing from his question was metahumans, merely stared at him in response.

Asten looked down at himself (and his gown that now had blood on it thanks to Bentley.) and muttered: “Merda!”

Bentley was hit by a sudden wave of vertigo, and he squeezed his eyes shut in an attempt to push it away. It just made him kind of nauseous. “I… don’t feel so good.”

As if his words were a queue, he was lifted back off the floor by Davis.

“What happened to him?” Asten asked, pushing himself off of the floor and wiping his face with the sleeve of his gown. Bentley wished he could do that — shove all his feelings and emotions and crying off to the side in a drop of a hat. “And where’s Nico?”

“We’re looking for him,” Davis replied with a deep breath in. “And someone… shot him. Bentley.”

Bentley hid his face away again like it was embarrassing to be shot, and they began to move into the hallway. Asten’s voice went up what seemed like a whole octave when he repeated: “Shot him?! Who in the hell?!” Bentley heard his bare footsteps pat-patting behind them.

“I don’t know. An employee here. He’s dead now,” Davis explained. There was a beep like he was unlocking another door.

“And how do you know that?” Asten pressed. 

Davis huffed, a calculated exhale. “Because I killed him.”

A moment of stiff silence passed. Bentley chose not to acknowledge the fact that the guy who’s shoulder his face was buried in had killed at least three dozen people.

“Am I… a metahuman now?” Asten muttered, a little bit of something like hurt prominent in his voice. Bentley felt Davis inhale, then shrug lightly, air brushing against him as he walked.

“Maybe. Maybe not, if I got you out fast enough. I’ve watched Keene work for long enough to know that it can take seconds or days for powers to fully show up. But that’s in someone whose exchange wasn’t interrupted,” Davis explained. “My hope is that you and Bentley didn’t go through enough exchanging to fully imbed them in your DNA.”

So… that meant if they were only in the machines for a few minutes, they were still normal?

Asten cleared his throat. “And… the mind control?”

Davis adjusted Bentley’s weight against him, and the bouncing that signified walking began. “It’s the last step of the Synchronizing process. I got you out before it was implanted. Bentley, too.”

Bentley let out a breath of relief he didn’t even know he was holding onto. The absolute last thing he needed was his teacher taking control of his mind.

There was a beep and a hiss, and another Synchronizer fell open. Bentley looked up just in time to watch the subject come tumbling out of it, landing very ungracefully on their hands and knees.

Bentley didn’t comprehend the blonde hair quick enough — before he even realized who it was, Asten exclaimed: “Nico!”

Nico was downright sobbing, and it looked like he had been for a long, long time. There were tears tracks on his face, and his nose and ears were a bright red that Bentley had only seen near the bus top the other night (after he’d been crying for an hour). He had his eyes closed tight, and he was very nearly hyperventilating, in an uncomfortable sounding, wheezy kind of way.

While the thought of moving made Bentley’s shoulder throb with agony that sent him coiling up tighter, Asten didn’t waste a second throwing himself across the room to their friend. “Nico, hey, buddy, it’s me.”

Nico looked up, his eyes snapping open and struggling to focus.

“Asten?” He choked, frantically sucking in air that didn’t seem to be doing much of anything. 

“Yeah — hey,” Asten continued. Without a warning, Nico lurched forward and pulled him into an extremely tight, probably painful looking embrace.

“Oh my God,” He sobbed, his hands curling up in Asten’s hospital gown just like they had to Bentley’s jacket. “Oh my God…”

“I’ve gotcha, buddy,” Asten said, patting Nico on the back stiffly. His eyes traveled around the room, bouncing here and there before they narrowed. Bentley only realized what he was looking for when Nico wheezed deeply, breaking into a string of gaspy coughs afterward.

They’d taken everything away from them, their clothes, Asten’s bag, their tools… and Nico’s inhaler.

“Merda,” Asten repeated. He began to move his hand up and down Nico’s back in a way that made Bentley miss Bruce. “Breathe through your nose.”

“Find him! Now!” Came a very sudden, very gruff shout from the hallway. So sudden that Bentley flinched, and then hissed in pain when the movement triggered a fiery ripple to move through his body. Nico gasped, loud and wheezy.

“We have to go,” Davis said, and Nico looked up at him, his eyes widening until they nearly covered his whole face. His big blue eyes flicked from Davis, to Bentley’s bloody body, to Asten, to Davis, to Bentley, to Asten.

“What happened to Bentley?!” He squeaked with a sob, falling into a coughing fit right afterward. “Where are we? What’s happening?!”

Asten grabbed his shoulders. “Hey, calm down.”

“What’s happening?!” He tried again. Bentley blinked in disbelief when Nico’s hands began to… shake. Not like, normally shake, but almost, like, vibrate. Like the night his leg was moving too fast. His hands were going back and forth so quickly Bentley could hardly see them.

Asten looked down at them. “Nico…”

“What’s happening to me?” He asked, desperately, sobbing and staring down at his own hands. “What’s wrong with me?”

Nico looked over at Bentley, and his eyes had yellow lightning dancing around in them.

“Nico!” Asten exclaimed. Nico’s hands were sparking, now, spitting the same yellow lightning that was in his eyes. It was crawling all over his skin, arcing from hand to hand with crackles that sounded deadly. He looked back down at them and started to panic, making a sound akin to a scream, coughing and wheezing and crying so badly Bentley thought he might throw up.

Dr. Keene’s voice echoed in his head: Abilities seem to grow more powerful, volatile in the presence of extreme emotional stress. 

Bentley opened his mouth to speak, but  a voice came before he could: “Well well well, what do we have here?”

Davis turned with Bentley in his arms, and there were men, six — no, eight — standing in the doorway. All with guns. All aiming at one of them. These guards had helmets on and thicker armor, so hardly any skin was exposed. Bentley had only seen Davis touch skin to induce death.

“Put the kid down, and put your hands where I can see them, Reaper,” A man with beaty eyes, front and center ordered. He didn’t pay Nico’s sparking hands much mind. (They were probably used to it here, Bentley guessed.) “If you listen to me, no one will get… very hurt.”

Davis, with no other real options, gently set Bentley on his feet. The child swayed — only a little — catching himself by grabbing onto Davis’s arm.

“Good. Good. Hands up, gloves on,”

Suddenly, one of the men in the back of the group dropped his pistol with a clack that made everybody jump. He began gasping and clawing at his throat like he was struggling to breathe, like something was in the way. Bentley could’ve swore he caught a glimpse of his irises… glowing white?

The rest of the guards faltered, turning back to look at him. Davis subtly maneuvered himself in front of Bentley; in the line of fire, just like he had at the bar last year.

Wind began to whistle and howl around the room. Around the sterile lab with no windows. It was whipping and jerking Bentley’s hair around, tugging at his gown.

Then another man dropped his pistol, and started to choke — gasping for breath like the air that was all around them just wouldn’t come.

Soon, all eight of them were choking. Coughing. Suffocating. The wind kept picking up speed and intensity until it got hard to hear, and Bentley grabbed ahold of Davis’s arm to avoid getting blown away. The guards’ eyes were bulging, their faces turning various shades of beet red at the lack of oxygen, eyes all glowing the strange, menacing white.

Only when all eight of them were on the floor, staring, unmoving, not breathing, dead, did the wind slow. The white faded from their irises.

Bentley peeled his gaze away from the pile of bodies to glance back at Asten and Nico, who were still in the floor. They stared back, and…

Nico’s irises were glowing white.

—

dedicated to @sassenashsworld 💚

—

tag list! (If you want me to remove or add you, ask in comments!)

@fleur-alise @sarcopterygiian @cademygod @skylathescholar @gayboss-too-close-to-the-sun

[maccreadysbaby]

A Hundred Ways to Become a Wayne

batfamily + oc insert

tw: graphic death(s)

wanna read more? here’s the table of contents!

want to read the first fic in the hundred days series so you understand what’s going on here? here it is!

me introducing semi-important supporting characters halfway through the book? you know it

part twenty-nine

❝ THE REAPER ❞

MONDAY — AUGUST 17 — 9:31PM

BENTLEY WOKE UP IN A WAREHOUSE.

Wait, what? Oh God, he’d really been kidnapped now.

His head was throbbing spectacularly, sending waves of pain rippling through his whole body, and his vision went out of focus every time it did. He was laying on cold concrete, staring at a large ceiling lined with industrial lights. There were boxes around him.

He glanced to his left and right. No Asten, no Nico. Only boxes. 

He pulled himself upright. Which was a terrible idea, because his head swam and pain blossomed through his skull so violently he let out a strangled whine.

He dropped his head down into his hands and sat, folded over himself for a moment. Where was he? In a warehouse, obviously. There were no windows or slivers of light that indicated what time it was — how long he’d been knocked out. It could’ve been hours. Days. He could still be in Gotham, or he could’ve been in Australia. 

He didn’t know. Bruce didn’t know. Bruce couldn’t track him.

Bentley pushed himself against a pile of boxes and brought his knees up, maybe to keep his kidnappers from seeing him right away, maybe to try and keep himself together. His head jostled at the slightest movement and felt like someone was banging on it with a hammer. What had that grenade done to him?

He blinked back the burn that surfaced behind his eyes. He had never, in his whole entire life, wanted to go home so badly. At the time, it had seemed unbearable — sitting in the medbay watching the Wayne’s suffer. But now he would give anything to be back in the Manor. He would give anything to be with Bruce again. He would kill to be back in his arms.

Bentley made himself as small as he could against the boxes and buried his head in his knees. Bruce couldn’t find him. Bruce wouldn’t find him. Batman wouldn’t find him. He was alone. He was going to die.

He found himself crying into his own knees. He wished he could tell Bruce everything — how sorry he was. Why was it when he tried to help them, he always screwed it up so badly? He ran away to keep them safe from his dad, and he got kidnapped. He ran away in an attempt to destroy the supervillain that was haunting them, and he got kidnapped. Why couldn't he seem to go a single year without getting kidnapped?

It was only then that he actually heard the other voices in the room. 

“Come now, Birdboy, you’re not going to sleep on me, are you? The party’s just got started!” It was a high-pitched lilt that sounded nothing if not manic. A shrill, high laugh echoed through the warehouse, a resounding heeheehee.

Bentley wiped his face and pushed himself off of the floor, turning toward the voices. He was careful to stay hidden behind the boxes as much as he could.

On the other end of the room, he could see a little group of people. One of them was so undeniably Robin. Red, green, and yellow, standing quite a bit shorter than everybody else in the room. It wasn’t Damian, though — not even Tim. It was… it was Jason? Maybe? He had Jason’s Robin suit, and Jason’s hair without the white streak. And he had-

WHAM!

Bentley jumped out of his own skin when a man in a white t-shirt cracked the butt of a gun against Jason — Robin’s — face. He disappeared out of Bentley’s sight by crumpling to the floor, behind a pile of boxes. 

The man with the gun stepped back, and another stepped forward.

Bentley took a deep breath, and it didn’t come back out.

Looming over Jason’s prone form was a man Bentley had imagined too many times to count, but had the luxury of not seeing until now. He looked just like described — his face, twisted and pulled into a smile so gruesome and terrifying and wrong, was a white only found among the dead. His hair was dyed a deep green, the outskirts of his lips coated in a thick blood-red that Bentley thought looked way too much like actual blood. The child could only see the top half of his plum purple suit under the warehouse lights.

“That wasn’t a very nice thing to do to Uncle Joker,” He crooned, moving around Jason, his movement slow and fluid but somehow also jerky and unpredictable. It made for a terrifying kind of manic shuffle that made Bentley want to pass out again. “You’ve been a bad boy. You must be punished!”

Bentley moved from behind one pile of boxes to another, a little bit closer to them. He could see Jason from there.

He couldn’t have been older than fifteen, and he was pulling himself off the floor from the blow of the Joker’s henchman — and it was just then that Bentley saw a woman, tall and blonde, standing in the background of the scene.

The Joker licked his lips in a quick, animalistic manner, and he had something in his hand now. He spun it between his long, creepy hands, and it made a menacing metal SCRAAAAPE against the concrete floor. “…This is going to hurt you a lot more than it does me.”

It was a crowbar.

And suddenly, Bentley knew what was happening.

Still, it didn’t stop the sound of terror from ripping out of his throat when the crowbar clanged against Jason’s head, a splatter of blood hitting the concrete only moments before Jason did.

“Heeheehee!” The Joker’s sick smile got bigger and bigger, and he let the crowbar scrape against the concrete while Jason futilely tried to get up. Only when Robin was on his hands and knees did Joker swing again, like he was sending a golf ball out of bounds. Jason, Robin, Bentley’s brother screamed.

Bentley moved forward again, the back of his eyes burning with something like desperation and rage. “Jason!” He tried. Not a soul in the room noticed him, so he moved forward again. 

And then he stopped.

He looked down at his feet. He was only about two yards from where Jason was laying, but he couldn’t move. Why couldn’t he move? He went to step but his feet wouldn’t go, wouldn’t lift, wouldn’t move.

“Jason!” He shouted, louder this time, crouching in his spot in an attempt to get closer. “Jason!”

CRACK! Went the crowbar too many times to count. CRACK! CRACK! CRACK! Bentley couldn’t move his feet, couldn’t run to him or away from him. Jason was screaming and screaming and bleeding and bleeding and Bentley couldn’t see because he was crying so hard.

“Batman!” Jason’s voice came out more as the desperate cry of a child than anything else. He was trembling on the floor, in a rapidly growing pool of his own blood. Choking on it. “Batman!”

CRACK!

“Jason…” Bentley cried, trying any way to move — crawling, sliding — but he couldn’t. He couldn’t move from that spot. 

CRACK!

Bentley flinched when the blood splattered on him. Little droplets on his face, his hands. The crowbar was red. The Joker’s hands were red. Jason’s yellow cape was red.

CRACK!

“Heeheehee!”

He ended up sitting down there, pulling his legs up and wrapping his arms around himself, stifling his small cries with his knees. “Jason…”

CRACK! CRACK! CRACK!

Robin had stopped screaming. His eyes were closed now, the skin of his face and arms and legs stained and coated with sticky red, flesh torn apart and mutilated from the end of the crowbar. His black hair was even darker, filled with crimson. He’d gone eerily limp, not trembling, not crying, not begging anymore. And the Joker never stopped smiling. Not even when the blood of a child splattered onto his face, into his sickeningly wide smile, onto his teeth. 

Bentley was trembling. Jason didn’t deserve to die. Jason didn’t deserve to die. Jason didn’t deserve to die. Where was he? Would Bruce ever find him? Why couldn’t he move? Why wouldn’t his body obey? Why couldn’t he look away?

CRACK!

“Jason!” Bentley tried futilely to grab Robin’s attention, to wake him up, to distract the Joker, anything. But no one could see him. No one could hear him. “Jason, please get up.”

CRACK!

“Stop it!” Bentley screamed uselessly at the Joker, who couldn’t hear or see him anyways. “Jason…”

The woman came closer, talking to the Joker, but Bentley couldn’t hear them. He was too busy staring at Jason’s mangled body. Where was Bruce? Where was Batman? Why was Jason all alone? He couldn’t move. He just had to watch him… die.

Suddenly, the Joker tied the blonde woman to a support beam and left the warehouse — but not before putting something big and red right between her and Jason’s crumpled form.

Bentley squinted. He’d never seen a thing like that before — a bunch of red cylinders with a timer on top. Counting down from one minute. He remembered how Jason died in his father’s files oh so long ago… was it… a bomb?

Was that red thing a bomb?

Bentley still couldn’t move his feet. 

Jason began to wake up. He spoke to the woman, called her… mom? He crawled across the floor to untie her. Collapsed again. She tried the door — locked. Ten seconds. Bentley couldn’t focus on anything. The last thing he heard before his ears rang and the world went black, was Jason yell: “Dad!”

When Bentley opened his eyes, he was standing on top of the rubble that was left of the warehouse. All smoking and smoldering, concrete and metal and wood and destroyed boxes all piled up. All he could see was smoke — he coughed when he breathed it in. How was he not dead?

There was something red and green and yellow laying beside him.

He didn’t have to look to know Jason was dead — but he did, anyway. Which was a mistake.

Jason’s body was mangled and beaten to near unrecognizable levels. Bentley had never seen so much blood in his life. His head swirled, the headache from earlier coming back, and he felt like he might throw up.

“Robin!”

Bentley turned. Through the dust and rubble and darkness of night, he could see a silhouette. Someone moving through the rubble, too. Someone dark and large. “Robin!”

Bentley knew that voice, even if it sounded years younger and much more terrified than Bentley had ever heard it before.

He started running toward it. Shuffling through the rubble, hopping and jumping and sliding over debris, stumbling over himself just to make it to him. If he could make it, everything would be okay.

“Bruce!” Bentley shouted when he was close enough to clearly make out the Batman suit. His vision kept blurring and clearing thanks to his headache, and the fact that he was pretty sure he’d never stop crying again in his life. “Bruce!”

He didn’t see him, but Bentley didn’t care. He was almost there. Twenty feet. Fifteen feet. Ten feet.

He braced himself to crash into Bruce and never let go again, but when he ran into him, he…

He went… through… him. 

Bentley stumbled when he felt nothing but air, whipping around to face Bruce. He… Batman, was standing right there, but Bentley had gone through him.

So he tried again, pushing his tears away and walking straight up to him. He extended a hand to hold onto the edge of his cape, but he never felt it. He couldn’t touch it. His hand went through Bruce.

Bruce couldn’t see him. Couldn't hear him. Couldn’t feel him.

“Bruce?” Bentley tried even though it wouldn’t work, bringing his arm up to wipe at his eyes. He reached for the cape again, and he never felt it. “Bruce, please.”

Bruce didn’t hear him.

Bentley crouched down in the rubble, near Batman’s shoes, one hand lacing into his hair as the other attempted one last time to reach for Bruce’s boot. It went through it.

“Bruce, I want to go home!” He cried, sitting down on the remnants of the building. “Please… I want to go home.”

“Robin!” Batman suddenly exclaimed, and he hurried off, leaving Bentley by himself in the debris.

He sobbed pitifully, covering his face with his hands. Why was he always alone?

“I want to go home…”

There was a flash of red light. A throb at the back of his skull. A stab. 

I want to go home.

Bentley gasped into consciousness, his head thumping against something behind him — something soft. 

All he could see was white, solid white, and bright, bright lights. The white was moving. Everything was moving, and something was holding Bentley up, but it suddenly wasn’t anymore, and he fell. There was smoke and he couldn’t see.

“Hey, hey, hey, I’ve got you. I’ve got you, kid,”

Bentley gasped for air like he couldn’t get enough. Someone was holding him — kind of. He was standing up but someone was keeping him from falling, his face was hidden in their clothes. Someone bigger than him. Someone who’s voice he hadn’t heard in a long time.

“I want to go home,” He didn’t even realize he was crying until he said that. But he was — silently, and pitifully. He wasn’t in a warehouse. He didn’t… he didn’t know where he was. 

“Take a moment… breathe,”

Bentley blinked, allowing his surroundings to come into focus. The person who was holding him was wearing a scratchy, white hospital gown. There were alarms blaring and red lights flashing in the otherwise white, empty room. A single metal door stood, closed, off to the side. A robotic female voice came: “Exchange incomplete. Please return subject to Synchronizer.”

Bentley turned, and his heart fell into his toes.

The thing he was in… that he’d fallen out of… it was the Synchronizer. The machine that turned normal people into… into…

He sobbed, and when he looked down, he was in a hospital gown, too. He was there. What time was it? How long had it been since they were at the Cabin? He was in the facility where metahumans were made… had just been in the machine that made them. Did that mean he was… 

The person knelt down ahead of him, their hands resting gently on each of his shoulders. He knew those eyes. That hair. The accent — he should’ve realized sooner.

“I think I… I think I got you out quick enough. I don’t think he got you yet,” Davis said, his once bright blonde hair now peppered with black streaks. His green eyes were the same as they had been the day in the bar, large and full of worry, bouncing across Bentley’s face. Each of Davis’s hands were enclosed in giant, metal gloves, with three huge clamps at the wrists that seemed to keep them closed. He rubbed his hands up and down Bentley’s arms even with those things on. Somehow, it worked to soothe him the slightest bit, even if they looked like something from a horror movie. “It’s going to be okay. Whatever you were seeing — it was the Secret Keeper. You’re not there.”

Bentley stepped forward, wrapping his arms around Davis’s neck without reproach. It had been too long since he was in the hands of a capable adult. Davis was a capable adult, right? Wasn’t he, like, twenty? Twenty-one? He was definitely capable, and probably an adult. The waiter didn’t hesitate to hug him, too, rubbing his back gently despite the metal gloves. How was he so gentle with those things on?

“Where are we…?” Bentley sniffled, and words proved to be exponentially hard to produce. He hiccuped quietly, leaning his head on the shoulder of the Davis’ hospital gown. “What happened?”

“I don’t know, exactly. I’ve… been trapped here for a long time. Mind control trials, knocking me out… makes time all confusing,” Davis explained softly, with a deep exhale. “But we’re gonna get the hell out of here.”

That sounded so nice. Really nice, actually. He wanted to go home. He wanted Bruce. He needed to see Jason… alive.

Davis started to move, unraveling his arms from around Bentley. “We should-“

“Wait!” Bentley exclaimed, gripping Davis’s hospital gown hard, burying his head there. “Stop, just… just… just… I need… a minute. I just need a minute. Please. I just… I need everything to stop.”

“Okay, okay,” Davis’s arms reappeared, one metal glove on Bentley’s back, the other, resting ever-so-gently on the back of his head. The weight of the metal seemed to keep him from floating away. “Okay. Take as long as you need, buddy.”

Bentley cried quietly, imagining that Davis was Bruce. Pretending he was at home and not wherever he was. Dr. Keene must’ve caught them in the woods. Brought them to the labs. Planned to turn them into metahumans, too. Where were Asten and Nico?

“Why…. Are you helping me? How are you not mind controlled?”

Davis rubbed Bentley’s back lightly. “I heard about what happened after you left the bar. It was all over the news. I could’ve stopped it the first time, but I didn’t. Now that I have a second chance, I’ll make damn sure I don’t screw it up.”

Bentley sniffled in response. He didn’t deserve the endless kindness of a stranger like Davis. They didn’t even know each other.

“And, about the mind control… I don’t really know. He hasn’t been able to control me for a while,”

“How did you know… I was here?”

Davis let out a puff of air. “Saw them carrying you down the hallway from my so-called enclosure. He was so damn proud of himself — Keene. Like you were some freaking trophy-“ Davis’s tone grew venomous, but he brought it back to normal before continuing. “Your dad… runs this place. I’m not handing you over to him without a fight. Not again.”

Bentley said nothing, but let his eyes drift closed. He was so exhausted in every possible way a human could be. Davis’s voice was smooth, layered with an accent he didn’t know, and it sort of reminded him of Dick.

And then someone yelled, from beyond the one closed door in the room:

“He’s in here! I need a keycard!”

Bentley was suddenly jostled when Davis practically shoved him away, grabbing him by the shoulders and pushing him against the wall, to the left of the Synchronizer. Out of the view of the door. “Shh. Don’t watch.”

“Davis-“

“It’s okay,” He said with a fake little smile, reaching up and undoing the metal clamps around his right wrist. “Don’t look.”

Bentley averted his gaze to the ground, and not two seconds later, Davis’s metal glove thudded against the tile. 

Davis’s fingers were black — a strange, smoky sort of black that continuously changed in pigment like watercolor. It moved like smoke under his skin, writhing like snakes, licking like flames. It tapered off at his wrist, transitioning back to his normal skin tone beyond it.

Bentley looked away when he realized he was staring.

He saw Davis move in his peripheral, taking up a spot against the wall next to the metal door.

“Careful, this kid can kill you,” Came a second voice.

“I have a gun — he isn’t gonna do anything to me,”

Bentley crouched down on the tile, reaching out just far enough past the Synchronizer to pull Davis’s metal glove out of their sight.

There was a beep, and the door slid open.

A man in a long white lab-coat with matching white hair stepped inside, a pistol clutched tightly, tensely in his hands. There was another man behind him, younger with dark hair, and he was holding a green syringe.

“We should wait until Charlie gets back,” Syringe Guy muttered. 

“We don’t need her,” Replied Pistol Dude. “This kids done enough damage. It’s time to end him.”

“But the boss needs him!”

“He also needs all his men to stop dying! And this kid’s the main cause of death! He is death!”

Davis moved like a shadow, tailing the pair as they came into the room, unaware of his presence. He floated like smoke, like the very vapor of death creeping across the tile, no noise, no warning. His green eyes turned a deep gray. 

Bentley was promptly reminded he was told not to watch, but he couldn’t help himself. He watched in quiet awe (and terror) as Davis simply reached forward and brushed his black fingers gently against Syringe Guy’s throat.

The guy’s eyes turned that deep gray, too, and the black blossomed under his skin, writhing there until he collapsed. Pale. Cold. Staring. Dead. 

The Pistol Dude whipped around at the thud, but he was too slow — Davis punched him with his single remaining metal glove, sending blood spattering across the floor and a sickening crack emanating through the room. A crack that reminded Bentley way too much of the crowbar hitting Jason’s flesh.

Davis reached forward with his black hand and grabbed the guy’s chin, turning his head back toward him. His nose was bleeding, and his eyes turned gray, a terrified look passing over his features when he realized what was happening. 

Davis sounded sincere when he whispered: “I’m sorry.”

Black blossomed beneath the man’s skin where Davis’s fingers were, the pistol clattered to the floor, and he dropped like a puppet whose strings had been cut.

Davis’s eyes faded back to their natural green, and he just stood for a moment. Bentley rose, pulling the metal glove up with him, gazing down at it.

He could kill just by touching someone.

A few seconds later, footsteps came, and the glove was taken from Bentley’s hands.

Davis cleared his throat lightly. “I told you not to watch.”

Bentley didn’t look up at him. “Sorry.”

Tense silence ensued, the room deathly quiet apart from the trio of clicks that came as Davis put the glove back on. Bentley’s eyes lingered on the bodies of the dead, of the black crawling under their skin, growing larger. 

He flinched when a metal glove landed on his left shoulder. “Don’t look at them.”

Bentley looked down.

“We have to get Titus out of his cell — he can get you out of here,” Davis continued, squeezing Bentley’s shoulder. 

“Wait! Tell me what happened. What’s going on,” Bentley ordered, exhaling shakily. “I-I need to understand. I don’t understand.”

Davis shook his head lightly. “I saw Keene and a few of his henchmen drag you into the facility, along with two other boys — one blonde headed, one blue. I recognized you. So, when a security guard came to give me dinner, I killed him, escaped my cell, and came to find you. And now the entire facility is out for my blood,” He explained. “But if I can get you to Titus, you’ll be home-free. He can take you anywhere.”

Titus Lancaster. The one who could teleport.

Bentley shook his head from side to side, in an attempt to shake the cobwebs off. His whole brain felt foggy and cotton-ey, and it was difficult for him to understand anything. One second he was in the woods, then a warehouse that wasn’t really real, and now, a lab in a hospital gown. 

Why couldn’t he catch a break? He felt like he could sleep for a week and cry for a year, and he still wasn’t completely aware of what was happening. He’d learned so much information, too much. He’d learned that Dr. Keene and his father were kidnapping people and turning them into mind-controlled metahumans just to spite Batman. He learned that Dr. Keene’s daughter was the Secret Keeper. That Davis could kill someone with his literal bare hands.

He knew what he needed to do.

He needed to go home, and he needed to tell Bruce. That was exactly what he needed to do. He needed to find Nico and Asten, and escape. Tell Bruce. Stop fighting before he died.

Bentley nodded at Davis, wiping at his eyes with his forearm. “We have to find my friends. I can’t leave them here.” 

“Jesus, kid,” Davis ran a metal hand through his salt-and-pepper-colored hair. “Even in the middle of this? Your hearts too big for your own good.”

Davis was right, of course. Bentley’s heart tended to be his fatal flaw.

“This facility is crawling with guards looking for me. You’re gonna have to stay close. And… try not to watch me, if you can,” He replied, clicking the clasps on his wrist open again. “Your friends are probably still in Synchronizers, too, if I had to guess. We can find them, break Titus out, and he can teleport you guys wherever you need to go. If we’re lucky, we might be able to eject your friends from their Synchronizers before the NeuroAmp — mind controlling tech — gets implanted. But we have to go now. It was a miracle I got to you quick enough.”

The metal glove was thrusted back into Bentley’s hands. “Ready?”

Ready? Absolutely not. Bentley felt like he could literally curl up and die on the floor right then, without any help from Davis. But it didn’t matter — they both knew his readiness didn’t change what they had to do. He’d never be ready, but at the same time, he’d never been more ready. Ready to escape. To go home.

Bentley nodded. Scratch everything. Scratch catching the Secret Keeper, scratch becoming a Wayne, scratch anything and everything they’d planned. His new goal, his new, number one priority, was to freaking. Go. Home.

Sounds erupted from the hallway, like a bunch of people running. Davis and Bentley made eye contact, the former grabbing the latter with his still-gloved hand and positioning him next to the door.

“It’ll be okay. Don’t look. I’ll whistle when it’s all clear,” Davis said, squeezing Bentley’s shoulder again.

The child nodded, his gaze drifting down to his black hand that was oozing the sticky smog of death. The sounds got closer.

Davis removed his grasp from Bentley’s shoulder and pulled that glove off, too, letting it hit the tile. Another menacingly black hand emerged, toxic, deadly.

He made one last second of eye contact with Bentley, and then he went into the hall.

Gunshots and screaming ensued.

—

dedicated to @sassenashsworld 💚

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